In a panic-filled scene after several kids passed out, more than 40 elementary school students and six adults in Atlanta Monday morning were rushed to a local hospital for carbon monoxide poisoning, various press accounts reported.
According to the story in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, children at the Finch Elementary School started to report that they were feeling sick, with headaches and nausea and dizziness at 8:30 a.m. The school principal evacuated the 500 students in the school, and some had already been overcome by the potentially lethal fumes and had to be taken out on stretchers, the Atlanta newspaper reported.
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/students-overcome-by-carbon-monoxide-at-atlanta-sc/nTL93/
EMTs and firefighters arrived at the scene, with officials checking students and school workers in the parking lot to decide who needed to go to the hospital, the Constitution-Journal reported. As it turned out, 43 students and six school staff members were sent to local hospitals for treatment, according to NBC News.
All of them had been released by 5 p.m. Monday.
Authorities suspect that the school’s heating system was responsible for the carbon monoxide leak, the Atlanta newspaper said. The school doesn’t have carbon monoxide detectors, nor is it required to under the law.
Under safety guidelines people are not supposed to be exposed to more than 50 parts per million of carbon monoxide during an eight-hour span, but the levels at the school were as high as 1,700 parts per million, the Atlanta paper reported.
Leave a Reply
Want to join the discussion?Feel free to contribute!