Monday, March 22, 2010

The dangers of smoking while on oxygen were made very clear Monday after a woman was seriously injured. The elderly woman is a resident of an apartment building that houses retired people.

Just after 8:00 Monday morning, 911 got the call of a fire inside one of the apartments at Somerset Plaza Tower. When the firefighters arrived, they put on their air packs, grabbed their hoses, and prepared for the worst as they headed up to the fifth floor.

From the outside, it doesn't look like much, but on the inside, we see that this fire could have easily been much more serious. A trail of burned carpet from where a lit cigarette caught an oxygen line on fire.

"She was apparently smoking while she had the oxygen mask on," said Wichita Fire Battalion Chief Andy Cole. "She forgot to take the mask off or whatever... and lit up the cigarette and we can show you right here what the ramifications were from that."

If the fire would have kept burning, Cole says it would have eventually spread to other apartments, placing more residents in danger due to the hardship of evacuating dozens of elderly people out of a high rise building.

"The sheetrock and metal closet doors stopped that," Cole said. "If we would have had any clothes or anything in here... we would have had a heck of a mess here."

Three years ago, firefighters demonstrated just how quickly a cigarette can light an oxygen cannula... very quickly lighting a flame around the face of a dummy and catching its clothes on fire. The flame continued to travel all the way up the oxygen tube.

Wichita's Via Christi St. Francis Regional Medical Center, which houses the only burn center in Kansas, sees around 40 patients each year who are suffering from careless smoking injuries.

"What happens in these patients when they get an injury like that is that they require a breathing tube to be put in," said Dr. Anjay Khandelwal of Wichita Surgical Specialists. "They're connected to a machine and their lungs tend to get very lazy very quickly and it's difficult to wean them off the ventilator."

Wichita firefighters say the unidentified person injured in Monday morning's incident was very fortunate not to have been more seriously hurt.