Thankful to be alive!

The Rietema family is thankful to be alive this week after a carbon monoxide scare! On Sunday morning at 3:45 a.m., I awoke to the sound of the carbon monoxide detector beeping loudly. I woke up Ami and Kylie and sent them out to Dad and Mom's house just to make sure. I then ended up calling 911 just to make sure nothing was seriously wrong, even though I thought it was just a warning sound that the batteries were dead in the detector.

When the cops, fire truck, and ambulance arrived at 4 in the morning, it was quite the scene! The firemen came into the house with their carbon monoxide detector and immediately found that it was at a very dangerous level and opened up some windows. The fire marshall wouldn't even let me back into the house because it was too dangerous.

The fire marshall called a cooling/heating guy to come inspect our furnace, and I went into the ambulance to get tested for cm poisoning. The firemen went back into our house with their suits and masks on and discovered the cm level had now doubled since 5 minutes earlier and was at a lethal level. So they went in and turned off the gas and water lines and opened up all our windows until it cleared, and the guy could inspect the furnace. The firemen and EMT's said we were very fortunate that we had an alarm and that it went off, because it wouldn't have taken long for us to have been poisoned to death in our sleep.

Long story short, our furnace must have developed a crack in it and was leaking out carbon monoxide into the air. Our alarm went off in time to allow us to get out of the house before it rapidly increased to a lethal level. We are very thankful that God spared us on Sunday morning...He must not be done with us yet!

P.S. Make sure you have a carbon monoxide detector in your house....and check its batteries!