The owner of a company that inspected as many as 70 of the boiler units in an Airdrie apartment complex that was the scene of a deadly carbon monoxide leak in February says he was appalled by what he saw.  

Now George Pinel is calling on the government to make inspections on these types of boiler units mandatory.

On February 4th, a carbon monoxide incident at the apartment complex at 700 Willowbrook Road NW took the life of 12-year-old Trai Schlichter.  Just five days later, a second incident forced the evacuation of the complex. 

The City of Airdrie sent a letter to all occupants and owners of units in the building to have their boiler units inspected and serviced by a certified, trained, and qualified person, and set a deadline for the work to be completed on March 12th.

Pinell's company Instant Plumbing says that 80 percent of the boiler units they inspected in the building had issues that needed immediate attention.  He says that what they found is not unique to the Willowbrook apartments or to the boilers in question. 

"It's really a maintenance issue," says Pinell,  "Over time if you don't change your oil in your car, you're going to have some problems, and that's kind of what we found there.  A boiler should produce, in peak operating condition, around 100 parts-per-million (ppm) of carbon monoxide in the exhaust flue.  When we start approaching numbers of 150 to 200 ppm, which are not outrageous, they should be pulled and cleaned on a regular service.  We found some of them at 1,200 to 2,000 ppm, even one of them errored our equipment out, it went over 4,000 ppm, so at that point, you know you've got pretty much a filed boiler."

According to Pinell, that wasn't even the finding that was the most alarming.  "When you switch it over to the fresh air pipe which is drawing air in, we were getting readings back in there, one or two ppm is not great, should be a zero, some of them were 40 to 50 ppm.  So that tells you that we have a vent integrity problem at that point and something had to be done. Some of those boilers we just shut off, because they're just not safe."

Pinell says the problems with the boilers may not have been caused by simple neglect.  It might have been caused by unqualified service personnel working on them.

"There's a lot of them that have taken good care of those boilers, they're still running.  It's a lot like your car.  There's one guy who has a 15-year-old car and it's shiny and like new.  Another guy has an eight-year-old car and it needs to be replaced.  Is it the car's fault, or is it a maintenance fault.  These are not furnaces like we had in the 60's where you can kind of eyeball it.  These are all sealed combustion units and you need certain kind of training and you need certain kind of equipment.  

Maybe the homeowner has hired a guy, he's come in and said, 'yeah, it's all good.'  Well, he's assuming he's a professional, he's a gas fitter, he's a plumber, he works on these things.  Maybe they've gotten a false service out of that."

Which is why Pinel is calling on the government to make inspections on these types of boilers, by people with the right training and the proper equipment, mandatory in the province.  

"There's got to be a standard for inspections.  The piece of equipment that we bring in is between $900 and $1,500 per unit and we've got four of them and they have to be certified every year.  They cost a lot of money to run and adequately and properly, service these boilers and give you a printed report.  So over a year, two, three, four, five you can see these incremental changes in your boiler."

The City of Airdrie said that only about 10 apartment units had not had their boilers inspected as of yesterday.  The city was planning on contacting those owners/occupants. 

Pinel sums things up by saying, "The sad part is his (Trai Schlicter), death was totally avoidable.  And it will happen again unless the government takes action." 

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