As she does most evenings, Marjorie Harbo put on her pajamas the other night at her home in Essex and settled down on the couch to watch TV with her 2-year-old son, Adam.
That's when the carbon monoxide alarm went off. She ran outside with her son.
"The Fire Department told me when they came that if the alarm hadn't worked we'd be dead," Harbo said the next day, still shaken from the ordeal. She and Adam appeared not to have been harmed by the fumes.
The problem was traced to a faulty, corroded water heater, she said, and a maintenance worker knocked a hole in a wall to help ventilate the area and prevent a recurrence.
But Harbo and other residents of the Cove Village Townhomes say they are tired of the seemingly endless run of carbon monoxide scares at the complex and want something done about what they say are the aging or inefficient appliances that seem to be causing the problem.
In the last month alone, the Baltimore County Fire Department has been called to Cove Village on 20 occasions in response to carbon monoxide alarms, according to Elise Armacost, a spokeswoman for the department.
The residents' concerns are heightened by their memory of the deaths three years ago of a 48-year-old man and his two stepdaughters, aged 14 and 15, after inhaling carbon monoxide in their Cove Village home. Police said an investigation showed that a vent leading from a water heater was misaligned, which could have caused a release of deadly fumes into the family's rented house on High Seas Court.
Carbon monoxide alarms were installed throughout the complex after that incident.
"We, more than anyone else, want to make sure we don't have these" incidents, said Chris Davis, the safety director for Sawyer Realty Holdings, the company that manages Cove Village and some 30 other housing communities in Baltimore and Prince George's counties. "We don't hesitate to remove or replace an appliance if we feel that it's a cause for concern. It's not a matter of trying to get another month or a year out of a stove."
Davis said that most of the recent carbon monoxide scares had been false alarms, with no detectable levels of the gas - or very low ones. As a result, he said, maintenance workers are in the process of replacing all the alarms, under the assumption that some were simply malfunctioning.
