New Haven Independent

After an emergency trip to the hospital, Wesley thanked a city inspector for saving her life.

Wesley (pictured above, with city housing code inspector Rick Mazzadra), a young immigrant rights attorney, moved into a three-family home on East Rock’s Foster Street a couple years ago. She shared her story at a city press conference outside her home Monday.

On the evening of March 12, she and her son Erick DaSilva were sitting in front of the computer, talking to her husband in Brazil. Dinner, meatloaf, had been cooking for 45 minutes. When she went into the kitchen to check on the oven, she felt “really sick and dizzy.” She threw open a window. She didn’t know what was going on until a detector started talking to her.

“Carbon monoxide,” announced a detector she had just installed a few months ago.

“Uh-oh,” thought Wesley. She called 911. Safety officials told her that with the windows closed, the apartment had dangerous levels, 13 parts per million of CO. Anything over 9 ppm warrants medical attention, according to the city fire marshal.

“So my little guy and I piled into an ambulance” and sped to the hospital, Wesley said. They sat hooked up to oxygen tanks for an hour. They went home shaken, but in stable health.

Wesley didn’t realize what had happened until she woke up the next day. Then she called her inspector at the city Livable Cities Initiative (LCI), just to thank him.

Rick Mazzadra (pictured at top) had scoped our her home just a few months back as part of the city’s new citywide inspection effort . Under the Residential Licensing program, all landlords must pay for two-year licenses for, and undergo inspections on, rental properties with two or more units. (Click here for an update on the program at its one-year mark last summer).

Mazzadra found Wesley didn’t have smoke detectors. And he recommended she protect her home, especially her small child, from the “silent killer” — carbon monoxide. Carbon monoxide is an invisible, odorless gas that can prove fatal if inhaled in high enough concentration. A new city ordinance requires new homes (not existing units) to install CO detectors. Mazzadra recommended she install one, at the cost of 50 or 75 bucks.

“It made a difference,” said a thankful Wesley Monday afternoon. Wesley said she had gotten the home in a house swap from her brother. She was admittedly ignorant about what kind of detectors she needed to install. It turned out her new stove, bought in Sept. 2007, was the culprit. It had been pouring gas into the room.

“We Saved Two Lives”

LCI chief Andy Rizzo congratulated city inspectors for a job well done. He said he hoped Wesley’s case would wipe out the controversy that surrounded the initiative when it was passed two years ago.

Landlords protested the program was punishing diligent property-owners with burdensome fees in effort to nail down a minority who ducked building code. The program requires inspection of most properties except single-unit owner-occupied homes.

LCI hired extra inspection staff to undertake the systematic inspection of the city’s estimated 20,000 rental apartments that need to be inspected. (Section 8 and public housing are already inspected through a contract with the housing authority). The deparment had aimed to inspect all 20,000 in the first two years, ending on June 30 of this year.

“We’ll be damned close” to meeting that goal, Rizzo said.

So far, the city has inspected 1,787 buildings and 15,000 units. Landlords must pay for licensing fees — costs range from $75 for 2-3 unit multi-family homes to $350 for buildings with 20 or more units. Those fees added up to $273,900, according to the city. Rizzo said that revenue was nearly enough to cover the expenses of staff time and handing out free batteries for smoke detectors, though the program is a few thousand dollars in the hole at the moment. He said he was not aware of any landlord being sued or penalized for noncompliance.

“We saved two lives,” Rizzo said, “to me that justifies the whole program.”

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