Family’s Thanksgiving trip turns to nightmare as 19 members suffer carbon monoxide poisoning at rental cabin
Nearly 20 family members were forced to spend two and a half hours in a hyperbaric chamber after they were exposed to carbon monoxide inside a cabin they rented for an early Thanksgiving celebration.
Jade and Cassidee Smith said they and 17 other family members were staying at the Six Lakes Lodge in Duchesne County, Utah, over the weekend, when Cassidee and her sister began to feel weak — like they were going to pass out.
“I just kept telling [Jade] something is not right,” Cassidee recounted on KUTV.
A short time later, another family member found their 11-month-old lethargic and pale inside the cabin and immediately transported the baby to a local hospital.
By Friday night, Cassidee’s 12-year-old niece was also found unresponsive.
She said her sister had to shake her awake and screamed at her that her niece was not responding to her before she fainted on the floor, but Cassidee said she struggled to get out of bed.
She said she was experiencing “tunnel vision” and “blacked out.”
“I was just slapping [Jade] like, ‘You have to get up, I can’t move.’ I couldn’t stand.”
Soon, Cassidee’s sister, Jacqueline, also fainted, hitting her head on the floor.
“At that moment, I was like, ‘OK, that is three people. My wife is upstairs, she can’t move. There’s something in the air,’” Jade said.
The family then called 911 and opened all of the doors to the cabin, as others started to feel worse.
“We went from one unresponsive to four in about five minutes,” Jade said, noting they tried to get all 13 children out of the cabin as quickly as possible.
Deputies with the Altamont Fire Department arrived at around 2:30 a.m., according to a press release obtained by KUTV.
They used a carbon monoxide detector, and found high amounts of the poisonous gas in “the basement of a utility room” inside the cabin.
Deputies also said the carbon monoxide detector inside the cabin had batteries, but was not working properly, Jade recounted.
“You never think about that when you travel,” he said.
“You just think everything is going to be OK at the place you travel to because you rented it.”
All 19 family members were immediately transported to Uintah Basin Medical Center, with six needing to be brought by ambulance while the rest were able to drive themselves.
The Smiths said every single family member’s blood tests showed they had carbon monoxide levels over 8.5% while the 12-year-old niece’s levels were at 33%.
Carbon monoxide poisoning is defined as having carboxyhemoglobin levels of over 10%, while severe poisoning is associated with levels above 20 to 25%, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Every family member was then forced to sit in a hyperbaric chamber for more than two hours, but were all safe and able to return home on Saturday.
“It was scary, but it was really lucky,” Jade said.
“If one thing would have happened different, then this would have been a story about 19 corpses being found in a cabin.”
Meanwhile, Dave Nelson, of Six Lakes Lodge, said it is investigating the scene of the poisoning and will issue a comment when more is known.
He added that none of the other properties were affected and were therefore not evacuated.
