While traveling, we usually book hotel rooms for a safe space to spend the night and store our stuff. But what if we told you that even the hotel room with the safest lock ever might be a danger to your life? 

For example, let’s take today’s story. In it, a family consisting of a couple and cats were sleeping soundly in their hotel room, but they weren’t aware that they were slowly getting carbon monoxide poisoning. Luckily, they woke up and left before it was too late, but it raised the question of why the room didn’t have a needed detector? 

More info: Reddit

What if we told you that even the seemingly safest hotel room might put your life at risk?

Image credits: Kampus Production / Pexels (not the actual photo)

A small family was staying in a hotel room with an adjacent parking space

Image credits: Erik Mclean / Pexels (not the actual photo)

One night, while they were all soundly asleep, a driver left his truck idling in said parking space

Image credits: Khunkorn Laowisit / Pexels (not the actual photo)

Soon, the exhaust from the car filled their room, putting the family at risk of carbon monoxide poisoning

Image credits: alreadyburnt

Luckily, they were able to wake up and leave in time, but they soon realized that the room should have had a carbon monoxide detector

While the OP and his wife were helping the woman’s ailing parents, they were staying in a hotel room on the first floor, which had an adjacent parking space. 

One morning, another hotel guest, who was using said parking space, started idling his truck. For those who are not drivers and have no clue what that means, it’s when a vehicle is unnecessarily left running while stopped. While the hotel guest was doing that, the author’s room was being filled with exhaust fumes while everyone inside slept. 

Carbon monoxide fumes are tasteless, odorless, and colorless, so understanding you’re being poisoned is difficult, especially if you’re asleep. If you are awake, you’ll experience symptoms like a headache, weakness, dizziness, nausea, difficulty breathing, and a fast heart rate. Since the symptoms are similar to those of other conditions, many people don’t realize they signify the poisoning until it’s too late. 

Gladly, the OP and his family weren’t those people, so it wasn’t too late for them. After the wife woke up, she thought the haze in the room was due to a fire in the hotel, but they soon realized that wasn’t the case. 

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They went to the emergency room, where they each had to spend 3 hours hooked up to oxygen. This is a common way to treat carbon monoxide poisoning, by re-introducing the oxygen which has been lost back into the system. 

Remember when we said that the author and his family luckily weren’t the people who’d lost their lives due to CO toxicity? Well, in the emergency room, they found out that they were on the verge of it, as their CO levels were dangerously high. 

Image credits: EyeEm / Freepik (not the actual photo)

The OP and his wife weren’t the only live things sleeping in the room where the poisoning happened – their cats were there, too. Well, it could be determined from what was written in the post that they luckily weren’t hurt too much, even though carbon monoxide is poisonous for them, too. 

After everything, the hotel agreed to move the family into another room and the vehicle’s owner had to move his car. But what’s interesting about the whole situation is that the room they were in had no carbon monoxide detector.

The state they were in, West Virginia, required buildings like hotels (and many others) to have these detectors inside, so technically, the hotel broke the law and risked their guests’ lives. Some say the reason many hotels risk this is that CO incidents don’t happen frequently enough to “justify” the expense of installing detectors throughout the hotel. Gruesome, isn’t it? 

After realizing that the hotel had put them in danger, the OP took to Reddit to ask for legal advice. Who should they blame – the guy who was emitting the exhaust, the hotel, or someone else? 

Most of the netizens advised them to sue. Either the negligent hotel or the negligent driver – someone who was responsible – as it seems there are grounds for it. 

After some time, the original poster provided a small update, telling his advisors that a police report was filed, the family was in touch with an attorney, and they would try to get at least some kind of justice in this whole mess. So, let’s just hope that this is exactly what will happen.

They asked what to do online, and people advised them to seek legal action, which they said they would in their update

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