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Mon 17 Mar, 2003 02:24 pm
An Israeli woman and two of her children died from suffocation while sleeping in a room they sealed against a chemical missile attack.
"The family sealed the room preparing it for war, and slept inside with a barbecue grill burning [for heat]," Sami Issa, mayor of the Israeli Arab village of Kafr Qassem, told Israel Radio.
Israel has begun extensive emergency preparations ahead of a possible United States-led war on Iraq, calling up reservists to operate anti-missile batteries.
Israeli citizens have been warned by the country's defence ministry that they should stockpile food and water and prepare themselves "for all possibilities".
School children practice in schools how to put on gas masks and evacuate the wounded.
"War is on the doorstep and the family was apparently over-anxious... [The room] was completely sealed. The barbecue was burning in the entrance and all the gas masks and chemical protection kits were lying open," Mr Issa added.
Police reportedly found the mother and two children, aged 13 and 14, lying dead in the room.
Leaflets have been distributed on how to seal rooms safely
OK, IMO, the father of kids is a candidate to the Darwin Prize. Entering open-fire heater into hermetically closed room is tantamount to suicide. I cannot believe that there can be an adult man that is unaware of the carbon monoxide danger.
I agree. putting a BBQ in that room wasn't the smartest move.
Question: can someone die of his own carbon monoxide? I mean in a hermetically closed room.
People do not exhale carbon monoxyde that is openly toxic (it links to hemoglobine preventing it from transferring oxygen). The gaseous products of metabolism are carbon dioxyde and water vapors.
yeah right, chemistry never was my strongest course in school. Btw, they are both lethal. The monoxide poisons you. The Dioxide uffocates you. So the result is the same.
Well, Steissd, I don't know why you are not an equal opportunity Darwin prize awarder! In my opinion, the poor woman was equally a candidate. Since when do women not know that we need oxygen and that breathing and fire consume it?
Well, then the answer depends on the volume of the room. The oxygen contents of the air is 21 percent. When the air contains >=15 percent, it is suitable for breathing. If the volume of the room is 60 cu. meters, the average volume of lungs is 4 liters (0.004 cu. meters), normal breathing frequency is around 14 inhalations a minute (840 per hour), it will take about 18 hours to breathe out the oxygen in the dangerous way. But this will happen only if the room is hermetically closed.
The contents of oxygen in the exhaled air is 15 percent, so the calculation is as follows: time = volume of the room * difference of normal and critical percentage/frequency of breathing * volume of lungs * difference of oxygen concentration in the inhaled and exhaled air. This is an extreme case, when it is assumed that every respiration cycle implies complete swap of air in the lungs; practically, only 1-1.5 liters are being swapped, so the "survival time" should be multiplied by 2 2/3-4. This gives 48-72 hours for one man in a room having 20 sq. meters of area and 3 meters height.
Well, Dlowan, you are right. Kids' mother is eligible as well, if she was not too young, of course (this was an Israeli Arab family, and Arab women marry in very young age).
Kids were 13 and 14 - she can't have been all THAT young! Anyway - don't most people know about oxygen when they are kids? I sure did.
But perhaps they were not an educated family?
'Tis sad no matter what.
They were not too much eductaed, as far as I understood from the Israeli TV news: the husband is an unemployed construction worker, and his wife was a housewife.
From another source:
By MARK LAVIE, Associated Press Writer
"....Jumping the gun on precautions, the family, Israeli Arabs from a village near Tel Aviv, sealed a bedroom and opened their gas mask kits, then went to sleep.
A heater in the next room apparently sucked the oxygen out of the room, which was sealed against letting air in but allowed oxygen to escape.
Around 5 a.m., the husband awoke and realized his wife, 37, and two of their children, ages 14 and 13, were not breathing, police said. Two other children, ages 4 and 3, survived... "
From the news broadcast on the Israeli TV I understood that they entered the makeshift heater (namely, a BBQ grill) inside the room. The cause of death was not running out of oxygen: they got poisoned by carbon monoxyde that appears when the carbon-based fuel burns under condition of low supply of oxygen.
You mean, a housewife is uneducated? I know quite a few housewives with univeristy degrees, two of them married to unemployees.
Well, if she is educated, this makes her even more eligible to the Darwin Prize.
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