Family escapes danger after boy hears CO alarm

ONEONTA _ Kaleb Prentice needed to get up and get something to drink late Tuesday night.
Kaleb, a second-grader at Riverside Elementary School, woke up at about 11:30 p.m. and heard the family’s carbon-monoxide detector going off.
Star photo by Julie Lewis Kaleb Prentice, 8, holds the carbon-monoxide detector Wednesday as his mother, Tera Aikens, holds Ava, 2, and Abby, 5 months, at the entrance to the basement of the family’s home on Mountainview Avenue in Oneonta.
Not knowing what it was, he woke up his mother, Tera Aikens.
A problem with a pellet stove in the basement led to a carbon-monoxide leak. Carbon monoxide is an odorless, colorless gas that can poison people or lead to death.
"It was very high," Aikens said. "It was three times the regular limits."
Kaleb said his mother told him that the beeping sound he heard was probably just the television, but he knew it wasn’t.
"It was weird," said Kaleb, who is 8 years old. "I didn’t know what was going on."
Aikens tried changing the battery. When it kept going off, she called 911 and got the rest of the family _ Kaleb, 2-year-old Ava and 5-month-old Abby _ out of the house on Mountainview Drive and into the family van.
Aikens said she and her husband, Robert, have talked to Kaleb about the alarms, and he’s had some safety classes at school. Her husband wasn’t home Tuesday night because he is taking classes outside the area.
Oneonta Fire Capt. Jeffrey Walshe said nobody needed to be taken to the hospital. Firefighters cleaned out the pellet stove and vented the house to get the levels back to normal.
Problems with heating systems have led to more calls for possible carbon-monoxide poisoning, Walshe said.
"The (carbon-monoxide) detectors do their job," he said Wednesday.
Aikens said the carbon-monoxide detector was in the house when the family moved in. The pellet stove has been there for about two years.
"We’ve never had a problem with it," Aikens said.
Bette Aikens, Tera Aikens’ mother-in-law, said she was very proud of Kaleb _ and his mother.
"It’s great that he knew to wake her up," Bette Aikens said. "Some kids would have said, Oh well,’ and gone back to bed."
Tera Aikens took the children to her mother-in-law’s house to sleep Tuesday night.
Firefighters told her it was safe to sleep in the house after they vented it, but she didn’t want to take any risks.
"I was very proud of Tera, that she knew to call the firemen," Bette Aikens said. "They’re great. They’re very good."
Kaleb said the firefighters came with a "big truck."
"It was really cool," he said.
Everyone seems to be OK, Aikens said, and the house is fine. She said she talked to the children’s pediatrician, who told her they didn’t need to come in unless they were acting sleepy or showed other signs of carbon-monoxide poisoning.