When the detectors go off: inside a carbon monoxide call, and the volunteer department that answered it
For days there had been an odor coming from the gas oven — not alarming enough to stop dinner. But the evening a Fairhope couple sat down to baked potatoes, the carbon monoxide detectors began a blaring, relentless alarm they could not silence or explain. They called 911. Within minutes of giving the address, a red fire truck was on the street, and responders in full equipment were at the front door. Two more units followed.
The call turned out to involve a genuinely lethal situation: high levels of carbon monoxide — the odorless gas — inside the house. Firefighters opened every exterior door and window, ran portable fans, and read and reread their sensors as the levels slowly dissipated. Then someone called the gas company, whose technician found the culprit within minutes: a black, heat-resistant nonstick oven liner, the kind ordered online to catch drips, that the homeowner had placed across the bottom of the oven. Too wide, it covered crucial side vents, trapped the fumes and vented them out the back of the stove.
The technician asked to take the oven liner with him for use in future training sessions — a request the homeowner was happy to grant. The couple waited outside more than an hour for the all-clear, and during that wait one of the firefighters offered the line that sums up the whole department: “See these men? They’re all your neighbors.”
Who answers the call
The Fairhope Volunteer Fire Department is led by Chief Chris Ellis, with Assistant Chiefs Dalton Combs and David Thomas. Its members come from all walks of life — retired business people, former military personnel, janitors, teachers, as the chiefs put it. In summer the department averages around a hundred calls a month, many of them grass fires; in winter the calls shift toward heaters that go off or smell funny.
Recruitment runs through the department’s website: applications are read at business meetings, and new volunteers enter a sixty-day get-to-know-us stage where they learn the basics. Both Assistant Chiefs came up through the schools themselves, via the Explorer Post for ages 14 to 18 — junior firefighters who learned the basics so that by 18 they were ready to serve.
Four stations, and a fifth on the way
The department operates four fire stations across the city, with a fifth on the drawing board, supported by a cooperative effort between the City of Fairhope and the community. The city funds maintenance; the department supplements operating costs through fundraisers, including an annual letter mailed to residents of its jurisdiction and raffles — a Big Green Egg ceramic cooker was among the prizes at a recent open house, which doubled as a chance for residents to thank crews in person.
What the call left behind
The family that made the call came away shaken but safe, grateful for a professional, courteous and thorough response — and a little wiser about the plastic oven liners that many kitchens have in exactly the wrong place. The department’s advice travels well: if your detectors go off, get out and call, and never assume an odd smell from a gas appliance is nothing.
For the department itself, the call was a routine one among the hundred or so it handles in a busy month, staffed not by strangers but by neighbors — retired business owners, veterans, teachers — who train, fundraise and show up because the town is theirs too.