Feature
Safety not necessarily assured
by Kerrie Waterworth
A woman’s death after an accident with an unflued gas heater has sparked calls for such appliances to be banned.
It was a bitterly cold afternoon on October 11 last year when Dunedin grandmother Florence Pearson turned on her new gas heater. Pearson, 80, had bought the DeLonghi portable LPG heater three days earlier to help warm her Corstorphine home.
Two hours after she turned on the heater, the Fire Service was called to attend a fire at the house. Firefighters found Pearson and her clothes on fire.
A few suburbs away in Roslyn, one of Pearson’s three daughters, Rosemary Creighton, had just sat down to an early dinner with her two sons when the phone rang. “They said, ‘There’s been an accident. A fire. Your mother is in hospital and she’s been badly burned. Your mother was on fire when we found her.’
“I asked, ‘Is she going to die?’ and they said, ‘Yes.’ I just had this horrific vision of my mother on fire and them hosing her down.”
Pearson died in Dunedin Hospital the next morning, from shock and severe burns to her head, hands, stomach, back and legs.
Fire Service investigations found no fault with the unflued gas heater, a DeLonghi SR1 Slimline LPG model. But investigating officer Terrence Glass said it had a “loose flame when started on the low heating setting” and recommended “that at the point of sale, the one-metre rule and fireguard need [be] stressed to prevent people getting too close to the heater”. Firefighters believe Pearson stood or walked close enough to the gas heater to allow her clothing to catch fire.
In his June report into Pearson’s death – which found she died of “severe burning and shock” – Dunedin coroner Judge David Crerar recommended that DeLonghi undertake an immediate review of the safety of its gas heaters, especially the SR1 and SR2 models. “Such evidence as we have been able to obtain from the tragic death of Florence Pearson indicates that greater shielding of the flames from gas burners needs to be provided.”
Crerar also recommended DeLonghi and its retailers review the use of its “Safety Assured” sticker, and that all manufacturers of gas heaters review the safety sign requirement on their heaters. He said the gas industry, manufacturers and retailers should do more to make consumers aware of the inherent dangers in gas heating. Crerar directed that copies of his findings be sent to the Minister of Consumer Affairs and the Minister for Economic Development to ensure their respective departments supervise the recommended enhancements.
DeLonghi’s general manager for New Zealand, Eric Bleakley, declined to be interviewed but, in his submission to Crerar, said the SR1 heater “fully complies with all the New Zealand regulatory requirements and is fitted with all necessary safety features”. DeLonghi supplies the SR1 to its retailers with an operation and safety manual that says the heater is not intended for use by young children, or the infirm, without supervision, and that a 75cm gap must be maintained between the heater and furnishings. DeLonghi has sold more than 5200 of these heaters in New Zealand since 2005.
Creighton and her sister Isabel Owens say three days before the fire, their mother bought the shop-floor DeLonghi heater at the Dunedin Mitre 10 Mega store. The heater was sold at a marked-down price because it came without packaging or an operating manual. The coroner’s report noted that Pearson visited the store with her son-in-law and they both said they were familiar with gas heaters and didn’t need a demonstration. The sisters say Pearson was unfamiliar with this new model’s heat settings and safe mode of operation and believe she probably caught fire while trying to turn it down or off.
The immediate reaction from the family after Pearson’s death was to want to blame someone. They were angry the hardware store had sold their mother a heater without the manual and one not recommended for the infirm, even though she had come into the store with the aid of her walking frame.
Mitre 10 Mega managing director Martin Dippie wrote to Creighton and the Dunedin coroner, saying the store had since changed its policies to ensure a full set of instructions is sold with similar heaters and that customers are informed about the inherent risk of such heaters.
More troubling for the family was the discovery of how dangerous unflued gas heaters can be – something the sisters learned while preparing a submission for the coroner’s inquiry.
Unflued gas heaters have no flue or chimney to allow potentially harmful combustion products – such as nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide – to escape. In its submission to the coroner about the Slimline model, DeLonghi said “the carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide outputs are very low and are controlled by an analyser, which will shut off the heater if gases are detected at high levels”. Unflued gas heaters also produce water vapour that can indirectly affect health by increasing the growth of mould and dust mites.
New Zealand has more than half a million unflued LPG cabinet heaters in households across the country. Fire Service figures show LPG heaters have caused 153 fires since 2002 – the highest number of fires caused by any type of electric, gas or kerosene portable heater.
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