Heating season is here — CO calls, chimney fires and the first black ice
The clocks have turned and the hazards that come with cold, dark, closed-up houses are back on your run card.
It is early November. Heating is on, windows are shut, and daylight is short. That combination drives a predictable cluster of calls, and it is worth loading them back into how you read a dispatch.
Carbon monoxide is the first. Furnaces, boilers and space heaters coming out of summer storage are the usual sources, and so are generators run too close to a building. The early signs — headache, nausea, dizziness, several people in one house sick at once — read as flu this time of year. Treat a whole-household illness as a possible CO event until a meter says otherwise, and remember that a patient who improves in fresh air is telling you something.
Heating fires follow the same curve. Chimneys that have not been swept, creosote, and clearance to combustibles around wood stoves and portable heaters are the recurring causes. Expect more of them through the season, and expect some to be found late because the occupants were asleep.
For anyone driving, the first freezes bring the first black ice — bridges, overpasses and shaded sections cool first and stay frozen after the rest of the road is clear. Early-season crashes tend to come in clusters on the same stretch of road as drivers get caught out by the first cold morning. Watch your own apparatus on those surfaces too.
Shorter daylight changes the scene itself. Roadway incidents, searches and anything worked outside now happen in the dark earlier, which affects scene lighting, visibility to passing traffic, and the time you have before conditions drop further.
None of this is a forecast for your area. For actual conditions, temperatures and any warnings, check your own national weather service and local alerting. What this is: a reminder that the season has shifted, and the calls that come with it have started.
