Generators, Deaths and the Solution.
Nigeria is no stranger to electric power issues as electricity production is far from below average. Scene such as below is commonplace here.
Generators Under the staircase
Data Source: tcnorg.com
This is approximately 3700MW national production capacity. This is miserly capacity when you realise Nigeria has a population of 190million. Nigeria needs about 160,000MW of electricity capacity to be able to achieve 24 hours electricity
Our brothers in South Africa, with population of 52 million, has a national production capacity of above 50,000MW. Enough to use and export to neighboring countries.
This scarcity of electricity has made almost every home own an electric generating set. Then this brings me to the problems associated with it.
A typical night will have you hearing all sorts of generator noise. Some of these generators are kept dangerously close to living quarters.
Generators so close to living quarters
Above is my neighbour's generator. I have told him to move it further away from his window as this is not safe.
Recently, the news has been awash of "mysterious" deaths of whole family. There is more such stories here, some more can be found here. These are just but a few reported cases as there are many such incidents happening due to inhalation of generator fumes which went unreported.
How does generator fumes kill?
Carbon monoxide is produced by common household appliances. In poor ventilated environment, carbon monoxide emitted by these appliances can build up. When too much carbon monoxide is in the air, your body replaces the oxygen in your red blood cells with carbon monoxide. This can lead to serious tissue damage, or even death.
Carbon monoxide is colourless and odourless gas, that is how it got it's nickname silent killer.
The symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning include nausea, headache and fatigue.
High level poisoning can occur very quickly and rapidly leads to unconsciousness and death.
Solution
We should always keep generators away from living quarters. Irrespective of security (fear of theft) , it is imperative that generating sets should be kept at least 20m from living quarters.
Secondly, we should consider alternative source of electricity such as inverter or solar energy. We have abundance of sun here, so going the solar energy way is a viable option that is safer for all.
The last option is then left for the government, which we cannot really control, electricity generation should be improved to avoid these needless deaths.
Please drop your comments below, both for or against this article, as this will help me improve on subsequent articles. Do have an awesome day.