<excerpt>
Dunston, 18, died Thursday from injuries received from a fire in Rhinebeck, N.Y., 51 miles south of Albany. The teen-ager, who would have been a senior at Brick Memorial High School in the fall, was pronounced brain dead and taken off life support at a Bronx hospital.
Dunston was visiting his girlfriend on July 14 Amanda Barton, 16, whom he met online, when the fire started in Barton’s mother’s basement apartment.
Steven Dunston Sr. of Point Pleasant said firefighters found his son laying on Barton in the bathtub, trying to protect Barton from the fire. Both Barton and her mother, Grace, 52, died in the fire.
Barton’s mother, who was bedridden, used an oxygen tank and was a smoker, according to Barbara Cocuzza Pawlek. Pawlek said firefighters told her the fire was started when Grace Barton lit a cigarette, and the flame ignited the oxygen.
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To Grace Barton-What in the name of all that’s holy were you thinking, smoking around an oxygen bottle. You lived to be 52 years old and should have known that oxygen and open flames are a bad idea, but no you just had to smoke. Well now you are dead and while you killed two people with your stupidity, you won’t kill anyone else.
To Steven Dunston Jr- It’s a shame you lost your life at 18 because of your girlfriend’s stuipid mother. But one question that I wish you could answer because then you would still be alive. Why did you choose the bathroom as a place for shelter during the fire. Why didn’t you try to get Amanda outside the house.
I’m not even going to start into why an 18 year old who has been a member of ROTC for two years and was going to join the Air Force was dating a 16 year old he met on the internet (because the article doesn’t say how long he wa dating her)
My landlady was on oxygen, andstill smoked. Scared the bejeebers out of me; any day I expected the house to go up in a poof. Nice old lady, just could not stop smoking. She finally did keel over dead, but fortunately for everyone in the house, she did not have a lit cigarette in her hand at the time.
And…he may have been dating someone he met on the Internet (instead of at a sock hop or the drive-in movie theater, I suppose?) but his heart was definitely in the right place in trying to protect her at the expense of his own life.
Who knows why he didn’t help her make a run for it, maybe the mom slept in the living room or nearest the door; with a basement apartment, you won’t likely have windows you can escape from.
God, my parents were engaged to be married at about that age, and my dad had just joined the Air Force. I can just see him trying to protect my mom’s life at the expense of his own…
We had a family “friend” (she was my aunt’s friend, but no one else liked her much) who had emphysema and was on oxygen. Smoked like a chimney. Thank God she never blew us up. But can you say “shriveled up and bitter as sin”?
I see patients sitting in their wheelchairs complete with oxygen tank, outside the hospital entrance, smoking. It just makes me want to duck and run. What really gets me is that the nurses have to wheel these people out of their rooms, downstairs, and out to the smoking section. Don’t they realize that oxygen is flammable? I mean, the tanks do have those huge “WARNING! FLAMMABLE! KEEP AWAY FROM OPEN FLAME!” stickers on them. :rolleyes:
Oh, please do. I’d be very interested in hearing what you have to say, especially as a person who met her boyfriend (now fiancé) on the Internet when she was 17, said boyfriend having been an ROTC officer throughout high school, as if that has anything to do with fuck-all.
What he did was so smart something tells me he tried like hell to get out of the house. Solid walls of flame blocking your exit can make it tough to leave.
The bathtub is the best place in the house to wait for rescue. It’s well insulated with tile and generally nonflammable. Close the curtain or the door to the tub and stay low and it will be one of the last places to fill with smoke, and one of the last to get hot. Sometimes you’ll see houses burn down, and tubs on the second story still hanging there. They’re durable. On some drainage systems you also have a decent shot at getting some breathable outside air if you can blow the water past the drain trap.
Getting the girl in the tub, and laying on top of her to protect her was a coolheaded act of heroism.
Good job, kid. Sorry it didn’t work. Sorry they couldn’t get to you just a little sooner.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Skerri *
**I see patients sitting in their wheelchairs complete with oxygen tank, outside the hospital entrance, smoking. It just makes me want to duck and run. What really gets me is that the nurses have to wheel these people out of their rooms, downstairs, and out to the smoking section. Don’t they realize that oxygen is flammable? I mean, the tanks do have those huge “WARNING! FLAMMABLE! KEEP AWAY FROM OPEN FLAME!” stickers on them. :rolleyes: **[/QUOTE
Worse. I’ve seen the doctors and nurses puffing away outside as well. Of course, I was there to see my mother, who was being treated for smoking-related breast cancer, so I’m just a weeeeee touchy about this subject.
There’s a draintrap under the tub. It looks just like the one that’s under your kitchen sink.
The purpose of the trap is to hold enough water to keep the pipe completely blocked. In most circumstances you really don’t particularly want to breathe the air coming from your sewage system. It stinks, and it may have dangerous gases in it. The water in the trap stops it from coming through.
The air coming out of your sewer may range from mildly unpleasant to deathly toxic and flammable.
But, when you run out of other alternatives it’s worth a shot.
You just put your mouth over the drain and blow really hard, like trying to clear a snorkel.
I don’t mean to challenge you,pesch, but this is the first time I have heard of a cause and effect relationship between tobacco and breast cancer. Lung, throat, mouth—OK, but I don’t understand this connection. Forgive the highjack, please.
Fucking THANK YOU, and Recursion too. O[sub]2[/sub] isn’t flammable and can’t be ignited by a cigarette. It’ll make everything else burn really fast, if the room is saturated with it, but you can’t light a stream of oxygen on Earth.
I wouldn’t want to be breating drain gasses. If the house was plumbed properly, there should have been a vent pipe coming out the roof, but unless you have some hot Bernouli action or some freakish low pressure in the sewer, you’re not going to get gasses you’d want to breathe in a fire out of a drain. It’ll contain some quantity of hydrogen sulphide and methane, one which’ll kill you and the other which’ll burn.
