The killer in the cab
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I REFER to the article The killer in the cab (CM March 2) regarding the fatal accidents to drivers sleeping in their cabs caused by gas heaters. Is there some confusion between carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide? I would suspect that your last paragraph accurately describes death by carbon dioxide poisoning; the drivers would doubtless have died from carbon monoxide
poisoning, as you state, but the lethal concentration of carbon monoxide is surely well below 1 per cent.
I also feel that it would be helpful if you were to point out to readers that sleeping in heated cabs does not inevitably necessitate this sort of Russian roulette. Unflued gas heaters, like that in your photo, have a definite and totally predictable risk of fatal accident, but dieselburning heaters, and externally flued gas heaters, are intrinsically safe. The only common complaint we get about fumes with our Webasto heaters arises when our customers park up amongst trucks whose drivers leave their engines running all night, and exhaust fumes from these engines get into the cab!
D. G. RENNARD Webasto Sales Manager Hefac Engineering Witney, Oxon