Park City Fire Marshal Mike Owens is asking homeowners to plan ahead and protect their outside gas meters to prevent possible fires this winter.
“If you look around as you’re driving up and down the street, you’ll see these little white domes that people put over their gas detectors,” Owens said. “That’s one way of doing it. Building a little shelter over it is another way. You certainly don’t want to close it in, it needs to be open to the air. But we want to remind people to make sure that those gas detectors are protected. Several of the fires that we had last winter were caused because of broken gas lines.”
Owens said it’s easy for snow from the roof to fall, damaging the gas meters.
“The snow that falls, it’s heavy, and it pushes down,” he said. “As you’re walking around your house, things get stepped on and kicked and pushed underneath the snow. Ice forms and then that ice moves - snow is an interesting thing. It doesn’t just sit in one space, it moves around a little bit. So all of that moving has the ability to push those pipes around… Often that gas leak, it may happen at the meter but then it’s going to travel under the snow and it may end up coming up somewhere else.”
As home heaters turn on, Owens highlighted a silent, odorless danger: carbon monoxide, a byproduct of combustion. He said carbon monoxide detectors are just as important as smoke detectors when it comes to saving lives.
“The carbon monoxide detectors will tell you, they’ll go off at different levels depending on what type of detector you have, that there is this carbon monoxide in your house and that it needs to be taken care of. When it really comes down to it, there’s only a few emergencies that are actually threatening to your life. Carbon monoxide is one of those emergencies.”
Owens said most carbon monoxide detectors last from five to seven years.
