December 29, 2001
The Orange County Register

By: TERI SFORZA

At 8 a.m. Christmas morning, the Collignon family of Torrance cranked up the heat so they could exchange gifts in toasty warmth.An hour later, they smelled something burning.

Wisps of smoke began wafting from the heating vents.

The attic was engulfed in flames, and when the firetrucks arrived at 9:27 a.m., firefighters had to cut holes in the roof and bust through a hallway ceiling to put it out.

Like Santa, Mike Freige keeps a list.

His is labeled "Blazes caused by faulty furnaces manufactured by Consolidated Industries."

Dolefully, the senior fire inspector added the Collignon fire to it.

It has been 15 months since the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a warning about the extreme risk attached to the Consolidated furnaces, and Freige is one of the few California fire officials keeping such a meticulous eye on the problem.

The state of California doesn't keep track of the fires, even though it collects statistics on every fire statewide.

And the state's fire-prevention arm has not made any organized effort to warn homeowners about the extreme risk, even though there are about 190,000 faulty furnaces lurking all over the state - tens of thousands of them in Orange County - and all of them are expected to fail.

The risk is not simply fire, but carbon-monoxide poisoning as well.

The furnaces - sold under dozens of brand names - are ticking time bombs, and not enough is being done to defuse them, some experts say.

"These furnaces are going to fail; the only variable in the equation is when," said Riverside fire investigator Michael Whedon. "Most of them are more than 10 years old now, so you're going to be seeing more and more incidents. There haven't been any fatalities as a result of these furnaces yet, but I'm afraid it's only a matter of time."

Whedon and many other fire officials don't think the state is doing enough to head off potential catastrophe.

"That's the problem - there's no tracking system in place right now for these things," Whedon said. "The state collects reports for all the fires, but there's no way to quantitatively look at that data. That's why there's such a low number of fires attributed to these things - about 50. But I've handled 25 or 30 personally, and I know that I don't have a corner on the market."

state says it's not its job to warn people

Officials at the state Fire Marshal's Office - which was recently folded into the California Department of Forestry - acknowledge that they could do a much better job keeping track of the numbers.

But they don't think that warning the public about furnace risks is part of their purview, even though their stated mission is fire prevention.

"There's no doubt the fire service could do a better job keeping records and statistics," said Karen Terrill, spokeswoman for the Department of Forestry.

"In the fire service, we're good at saving lives, good at protecting people, but not good at statistics."

But Terrill rejects the idea that the state has a role from a fire-prevention or public- safety standpoint.

"If there's a consumer product that is failing, to me, that's not something that is our jurisdictional responsibility," she said.

"That's for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. That's not the role of the fire marshal."

The department's Web site does, however, feature a consumer alert stating that a Christmas-tree fire alarm designed to look like a decoration has not been approved by the state fire marshal.

one man has

taken on the issue

This is not just a product- liability issue - it's a fire and life safety issue, said Freige, the Torrance inspector.

"If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, it's duck," he said. "If you turn your furnace on and it burns the top of your house off, your furnace is a fire hazard, period.

"Anyone who has suffered from a fire caused by one of these furnaces would no doubt have jumped at the chance to have prevented their fire in the first place for the cost of replacing their furnace," he said. "A typical furnace replacement usually runs $1,500 to $3,000. There is no typical cost associated with an attic fire."

Freige is trying to be California's clearinghouse on furnace-related fires. "We were not looking for a project," Freige said. "It needed to be done, and there was no one else to do it."

Orange County fire officials have no idea how many furnace-related fires have occurred here.

"I wish," said Capt. Stephen Miller of the Orange County Fire Authority. "Pulling that information out of reports is not as simple as you think it might be. The reporting system isn't the greatest system. We're going to try to fix it."

Anecdotally, though, at least a half-dozen furnace- linked fires have been reported in Orange County, including blazes in Irvine, Yorba Linda, Coto de Caza, Foothill Ranch and Laguna Niguel.