In February Molly dropped her daughter Sheree, aged 21 off at Heathrow to join her son Gary, aged 26 for the last week of his holiday in Tenerife. The next day she received a telephone call and nothing was ever the same again for the Maher family.  The call told Molly that Gary was dead and Sheree was critically ill and in a coma from an apparent suicide attempt with pills and gas. Peter, Molly’s husband took charge.

Somehow the couple, together with their other daughter, Lindy, got themselves together and flew to Tenerife the next day. On arrival they found it was true, Gary was dead and Sheree had received the last rites in hospital. Expecting help, all they received were false reports of a suicide pact and corruption.

Peter, an experienced builder, insisted on a Judge and solicitor being present in the deadly flat. Peter then closed the windows, lit the water heater and took photos and measurements. The Judge panicked and shouted, ‘we could all die’.

So much for the police reports and the suicide pact. An illegally installed gas water heater was the culprit when Sheree had run a bath.

For the first time they learned about carbon monoxide (CO), a deadly gas which can be emitted from any faulty appliance powered by any fuel that burns (gas, coal, oil, wood etc.). CO cannot be sensed using human senses. Less than 2% in the air can kill in about two minutes. If only someone had told them about the dangers and the need to leave a window open.

The family received no help from the Government authorities or anyone else in either England or Tenerife. The first person to express concern was the then Labour leader of Brighton Council, Steve Bassam, now Lord Bassam. He introduced the family to journalists, who remain friends today. Media exposure of the dangers of CO was all the family could do. When Peter died, Molly somehow found the courage to carry on. Nigel Griffiths MP contacted her and together they formed the charity Consumer Safety International (CSI) to try to prevent CO deaths and injuries and other avoidable holiday tragedies such as fire, low balconies, pools etc.

I started campaigning for children’s activity holiday centres to be licensed after our son, Alex, then aged twelve, suffered a clot on the brain as a result of a fall while on a residential sailing holiday on the Isle of Wight. After a battle with the medics, (who preferred to take the view that Alex’s acute head pain was either migraine or my imagination), Alex had had brain surgery to remove the clot. In about a year, he had made a complete recovery. The fall was an accident but what concerned me was the lack of correct First Aid, which meant the ‘sailing instructors’ had not been qualified. I was afraid far worse could happen to other children. Being a barrister, I did some research and was horrified to find there were basically no controls on children’s activity holiday centres.

I then joined the canoe parents, who had lost four teenagers who drowned in Lyme Bay in March 1992. There was no safety boat and the students hadn’t been drilled to blow up their life jackets – something our then eight year old knew to do.

I wrote my first ever legal article, kindly published by the New Law Journal. The article advocated licensing children’s activity holiday centres as the most flexible and sensible way of applying common sense safety. Eventually the Activity Centres (Young Persons’ safety) Act 1995 became law. It was through this work that I met Molly.

She helped me with my work and I helped her with CSI. Molly had been lobbying the Tenerife authorities trying to persuade them to make safety improvements or at least put up warning notices. They were polite, but pointed out that the UK had its own problems. Molly found this hard to believe, ‘but we have the Health and Safety Executive, CORGI and British Gas’ she exclaimed. Then Molly heard that a young couple had been found dead in front of their gas fire on Christmas Day and on 25th January, CO-Gas Safety was launched at the House of Commons. I agreed to run the charity as a full time volunteer.

Our data of deaths and injuries (http://www.co-gassafety.co.uk/deaths.html) are almost certainly the tip of an iceberg as there is no automatic test on dead bodies for CO; GPs hardly ever think of CO, when a patient presents with TATT (Tired all the time e.g. Dr. Copperfield in The Times Body and Soul 23rd August 2008). 45% of households have never received any information about CO (UCL research). How do you protect yourself against a deadly gas you cannot sense using human senses and you don’t even know exists?

I have been sitting on committees, made up almost entirely of wealthy industry, since 1998 to discuss how to raise awareness of the dangers. The industry has simply refused to pay for the needed warnings. HSE recommended that a levy be imposed to pay for this in 2000, yet Government failed to implement this. The Gas Emergency Service does not even have equipment to test for CO although it has a duty to ‘make safe’ from it.

So without proof of CO the industry can allege that there isn’t a problem or at least that it’s tiny. 

The Corfu parents, who tragically lost Christi, aged 7 and Bobby, aged six in 2006 to CO, knew nothing about CO. If they had they might have had a CO alarm with them and the children might still be alive.

Gary died in 1985, twenty one years before Christi and Bobby, yet so little has changed. CO-Gas Safety was launched in 1995 and despite all our work, not much has changed, even in the UK.

At a recent, much publicised event at the House of Lords, which I organised, we asked Lord McKenzie, Minister responsible for the Health and Safety Executive, what he thought should be done? He responded that industry needed time. We asked him how many decades would it take before the government decided to impose a levy? CSI tried hard to work with the travel industry, the tour operators, ABTA, the FTO, the Foreign Office etc. We even suggested to Baroness Amos that she impose compulsory insurance for those travelling abroad but she said this would impinge on civil liberties. What about the civil liberties of the parents who can’t even afford to pay for the return of the body of their dead child? We suggested, as an alternative, an increase in the  passport fee by a pound or two to pay for repatriation of the severely injured person or the body and a Helpline. She refused. The passport fee has increased vastly, but where are the benefits? CSI also worked with Brenda Wall of HolidayTravelWatch and we greatly admire her work and that of Frank Brehany, who has so ably stepped in to fill the gap sadly left by Brenda’s death. A huge amount of work has been done by victims, their families, campaigners and charities to prevent deaths and injuries. Where is the help, co-operation and funding by big business and/or Government?

There’s still no properly set up and funded body to help injured travellers or victims of fuel poisoning. I’ve even been awarded an OBE for my work on gas safety, which is great but I’d far rather the changes that are needed to stop these deaths and injuries, had been brought in by Government so I could retire from my all-the hours-God-sends-existence plus the huge frustration and grief of yet another unnecessary tragedy. 

CO-Gas Safety is looking for sponsors for the second year of a schools’ poster competition to inform children, young people, families and teachers of the dangers of using fuel that burns. We ran one in 2007-8 and are having a prize giving at the Houses of Parliament in the autumn, at which we will also launch the 2008-9 competition. The costs of the competition are around £20,000 – peanuts to big business. This poster competition is supported by the Corfu parents and their MP, Ed Balls, Secretary of State for Children, Schools & Families. You’d expect companies to be falling over themselves to support us. It is surely, to put it in language corporations understand, ‘a win, win, win situation’. So if a big corporation, an energy company or perhaps one of the tour operators, wants to sponsor the competition, do visit http://www.co-gassafety.co.uk/competition.html and do drop me a line office@co-gassafety.co.uk

Come on, surprise us.

Note:  The presentation referred to will be taking place at The House of Commons on Tuesday 20 January 2009.  This guest article first appeared in the January edition of ‘Get’away – Your Route to Travel Rights’

Tags: carbon monoxide

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