Alarms save lives

Shirley Foley awoke Saturday morning around 5:30, with high-pitched alarms blaring. Something smelled like burnt plastic. She woke her neighbors in the two-family house in Charlestown.
Fire officials say it was a good thing. Underground high voltage power lines had ignited, possibly because they had become wet and had shorted, and were sending lethal amounts of carbon monoxide into the homes. Carbon monoxide monitors in Foley’s building went off.
"It was a pretty serious situation," Foley said. "Thank God we’re all OK, and thank God we had the monitors. We could have lost people."
Caroline Allen, a spokeswoman for NStar, said Saturday’s incident was rare and was probably caused by wet weather that allowed water to seep into underground cables and act as a conductor, shorting wires whose insulating layer had probably worn through. The underground fire sent carbon monoxide into nearby homes through ducts and pipes. It also caused a power outage that affected about 25 houses and took about 24 hours to fix.
"This is not something we hear about all the time," Allen said. "Because there were all these factors came into play at one time, it looks like that’s what caused the carbon monoxide to travel through the conduit. The good news in this case was that they had a carbon monoxide detector."