Va. lawmakers approve carbon monoxide bill
Legislation will require schools and day cares to have detectors
Legislation that will require schools and day cares in Virginia to have at least one carbon monoxide detector sailed through the state Senate Monday, sending the bill to Gov. Ralph Northam for his expected signature.
The bill was sponsored by local Democratic Dels. Alex Askew and Kelly Convirs-Fowler, whose districts cover parts of Virginia Beach and Chesapeake.
It all started almost a year ago, when carbon monoxide leaked at Kids Town Learning Center, a Virginia Beach day care center. The colorless, odorless and dangerous gas had been leaking for an unknown amount of time when a teacher’s husband brought in a detector to check after some people there started feeling nauseated and having headaches.
Nikki Zellner’s sons, then 3 and 4 years old, attended Kids Town, and when she picked them up after the scare, she learned detectors weren’t required.
That set off a year of intense research and advocacy for her, trying to raise awareness about the unseen dangers of carbon monoxide exposure.
“Just because a major disaster hasn’t happened here doesn’t mean it couldn’t,” Zellner said earlier this month. “This is something preventable. If I can help one family to not go through this experience, all this will have been worth it.”
Virginia’s current building code actually requires detectors in all new structures, including schools, as of 2015. The problem is that the process by which Virginia officials update that code does not allow them to mandate the retrofitting of existing buildings. That had to be done legislatively.
Askew said he noticed the issue when The Virginian-Pilot wrote about it last year, and quickly teamed with Convirs-Fowler to bring forward the legislation, which will complement the building code and require at least one detector in licensed child care centers and public schools built before 2015.
In both chambers of the General Assembly, the legislation passed with a single dissenting vote. On Jan. 21, it passed the House 98-1; on Monday, the Senate 38-1.
“At no point in my life did I think I would be tuned into live streams of the General Assembly for weeks,” Zellner, a community relations director for a local orthodontics office, said in an email Monday. “I testified during subcommittee, and cried when I got off the call. To see it get to this point, there are just no words.”