Troy Roberts showed us the window he has cracked at all times. One in the kitchen, others in the bedroom. “You got to sleep with the window cracked with the air on just so you will wake up the next morning.”
The fear is real at the Cove Village Apartments in Essex where kids play around a home on High Seas Court now deemed dangerous after 5 residents were rushed to the hospital early Tuesday morning suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning.
But Roberts said that home has had problems for the past 2 months. “Police, fire department coming out here 11 o’clock at night talking about the carbon monoxide detector is not working," he said.
Roberts lives next door to the unit where in 2005 2 young girls and their stepfather died of CO poisoning. One month later, 9 residents were rushed to the hospital. In a 2008 public safety meeting representatives with Sawyer management promised off camera to step up patrols and increase monitoring. When we asked about the response one year later we heard, “Since they put the detectors much of nothing really.”
“We pay a lot of money for rent and they should be taking care of us. I mean I'm a single woman and this is not cool at all," said another neighbor Tana Bralski. Bralski said the detectors were a selling point for managers when she first rented a short time ago. Now she and Roberts are thinking about moving and going to bed - praying.
The building inspector believes the colorless, ordorless gas entered the home through a vent pipe on the roof that was dangerously close to an exhaust pipe. Symptoms of CO poisoning include dizziness and nausea.
Calls to management were not returned.
