Abstract

During the last 13 years, Chile has experienced a considerable economic growth which has given a boost to the building business. In particular, more than 300 hundred new multi-storey buildings are built each year in Santiago. However, many of them have been designed with old fashioned open flue/natural draught gas appliances, instead of using more secure ones like closed flue, fanned draught or water heating central systems. In addition to this, low quality materials, unqualified personal and an obsolete regulation, are the causes of several accidents by CO indoor contamination in multi-storey buildings, resulting in death and severe injuries. During 1997, 3 deaths of young women and 20 cases of severe intoxication were officially attributed to CO poisoning in Santiago, and it is believed that many more people have died by this cause but attributed to natural causes. A methodology to evaluate indoor CO pollution is described and general results of applying this procedure to more than 4000 flats in 150 buildings are presented. The results shown that in 27% of new buildings indoor CO reaches undesirably high concentrations. For buildings less than 5 years old, this figure rises to 85%. Finally, the chance of having dangerous CO levels is 4 times higher in 10-storey (or more) buildings than in 5-storey (or less) buildings.