Within hours of this photo, Jane and Chris fell victim to a horror that will alarm everyone who loves a barbecue
JAnE Bainbridge’s memory of her fateful camping trip has returned slowly over the years in, as she describes it, a ‘kaleidoscope’ of terrible flashbacks. ‘Little things like the sound of sirens or the smell of fresh wood brings it all back ,’ says the 48-year- old who has suffered PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) and trauma-induced amnesia since then.
‘once I remembered enough, I put it all down on paper because I thought I was going mad,’ she says. ‘It should never have happened.’
It’s only now , six years later , that Jane, an administration officer from Darlington, County Durham, feels brave enough to speak publicly about what actually happened to her and her husband Chris, a council management information officer, on their trip to in W atermillock, Cumbria, a picturesque area of the Lake District. There, they had planned to spend an idyllic weekend glamping, walking and taking in the beautiful surroundings.
The couple were staying in a luxury pod — a small wooden cabin — at The Quiet Site, a campsite near ullswater, and had arrived feeling happy on Friday, March 9 in 2012.
That afternoon they lit a portable charcoal barbecue outside their cabin — and within hours, both had been poisoned by the carbon monox - ide emitted from it.
They were not found until the following Monday, 72 hours later, by the site manager and owner after colleagues and relatives raised the alarm when neither showed up for work.
Chris, 45, was dead. Jane, then 42, was barely conscious, hypo - thermic and near-paralysed.
‘Every time I hear the words “72 hours” I feel sick to my stomach,’ she says. ‘W e lay there all that time and nobody missed us.
‘It sounds like a cliche but I’ve lost my best friend,’ adds Jane, speaking from the home the couple shared in Darlington, and which she says she will never leave. ‘It was like losing a limb. I’m not the person I was.
‘But I’ve never thought I was a victim. Chris was the victim, I’m still here.’
She is retelling their story today as a stark warning to this summer’s influx of holidaymakers who will descend on glamping and camping sites over the coming weeks.
About 1.2 million of us regularly camp. But despite the fact that fire and and carbon monoxide alarms are fitted in many cabins and caravans, accidents still happen.
Last September, a couple in their early 20s were critically injured when a fire swept through their glamping pod on a site in Frodsham, Cheshire.
Both were pulled out in time by a neighbour and taken to hospital with severe burns and respiratory damage. Fire chiefs, at the time, blamed clothes left too near to a log burner; a statement the family disputed.
But if the dangers and signs of fire are obvious, those of carbon monoxide are almost invisible.
A colourless, odourless ,tasteless gas emitted by burning fuels such as gas, wood, propane or charcoal, it can cause irreversible brain damage and death before victims even realise what’s wrong.
Symptoms of poisoning at first may seem flu-like, and include dizziness, confusion, nausea, blurred vision, weakness — and then a loss of consciousness.
Carbon monoxide poisoning , causing 50 deaths a year and hospitalising 200, has been dubbed a ‘silent killer’.
But the Bainbridges knew the dangers of carbon monoxide — part of Jane’s job involved warning clients about gas leaks in home boilers. They took precautions, yet still tragedy struck, and Jane is determined that lessons should be learnt from her experience to warn others of the potential dangers.
It was a beautiful spring morning when the Bainbridges left home ready to recharge their batteries with some time away . They had stayed at the glamping site several times before and were familiar with the area, having been frequent visitors to the Lake District for more than 20 years.
They unpacked steaks and corn-on-the-cob for later before venturing into the nearby village to escape a slow drizzle that had begun. There they visited two pubs, where Chris had two shandies, Jane had two beers and they played pool before returning to the campsite at 4pm to cook dinner in daylight.
‘We were very health-and-safety conscious,’ she says. ‘We weren’t drunk and we never touched drugs.’ The rest of Jane’s recol - lections of the evening are hazy due to the effect of the gas.
After Chris died, the police took away the couple’s phones as evidence, and when they were returned weeks later she found a photo of them both together , taken just after the barbecue was lit, although she has no memory of it being taken.
The couple are smiling and raising a toast. ‘If you zoom in on our eyes, though, you can see we are already out of it, we don ’t look ourselves at all,’ says Jane. The eerie photo helped trigger memories about that afternoon.
She remembers the wind strengthening and moving the barbecue they’d lit further away from the pod so its flames didn ’t blow too close as they sheltered from the rain on the deck.
Soon afterwards, she visited the site’s toilets.
‘I was bouncing off the walls. I felt absolutely wrecked. Coming out I lost my footing and staggered several metres towards a caravan and had to stop myself falling by putting both hands on it. At that point, I realised something was desperately wrong and began to panic.’
Somehow she made it back to Chris but the exposure had already been too much. her final memory is of collapsing inside the pod and looking back at Chris as he sat still in the corner. It’s an image she finds hard to forget.
‘I thought he was having a nap but clearly he had lost consciousness. When they found us he was still sat there, looking over me. We couldn’t do anything to help each other. It was too late.’
Three days later Jane regained consciousness to the sound of banging as people tried to get in to their pod.
‘I could hear them but I couldn’t move an eyelash. I managed to make a moaning noise but my brain was completely battered.
‘ The pain in my foot and shoulder was unimaginable.”
The bucket barbecue was found just inside their pod. Although Jane has no recollection of bringing it in, she believes they must have done so once they thought it had gone out.
She spent the next ten days in hospital. Most of her muscles had collapsed, she had peripheral neuropathy ( severe nerve damage) from lying in the same position for so long and her hair fell out due to shock. Jane had to relearn how to walk and talk while her and Chris’s family begged her to keep fighting.
‘I just kept saying I was sorry it was him and not me. At his funeral three weeks later I was determined to walk behind his coffin and I did, through sheer determination.’
Counselling and cognitive
behaviour therapy has helped process the overwhelming sense of grief, loss and despair but she suffers anxiety and PTSD and struggles to leave the house, especially in winter when darkness and feelings of claustrophobia close in.
She takes amitriptyline, an antidepressant, to calm her nerves but was unable to return to work afterwards and currently lives off her widow’s pension. Physically, the scars run deep. Jane has little control of her left foot and cannot stand or sit for long periods due to a weakened left side.
‘ In cold weather the pain increases and my toes go black. It is like trench foot.
‘I used to be the life and soul of the party but now I just get through each day as best I can.’ Jane and Chris met when they were in their early 20s, in a pub near their Darlington homes.
As soon as she saw Chris, Jane knew they were destined to be together. She was a barmaid and he would bowl through the door with friends after work. The attraction was immediate.
‘I told the others working there: “He’s mine”,’ she laughs. ‘ We chatted. I think I scared him at first.’ Romance soon followed, and in 1996 they married.
‘My husband was my best friend, and he loved me unconditionally. A friend in him was a friend for life. In the 15 years we were married I never heard him say a bad word. He was the most placid, lovely person you could ever meet. We tried for children and I had IVF but it never happened. Maybe that’s a blessing — or maybe we would never have gone on that trip if we’d had children. I try not to dwell on it.’
She pauses. ‘If anyone ever had a barbecue he would be doing it. He was the barbecue king.’
Today she blames a change in wind direction and their positioning — on the decking, sheltering from the rain with the door to their pod shut behind them — for what happened.
‘ The fumes had no place to escape and we were sat right in the middle of it. We were so careful. It was a freak of nature. I don’t blame anyone by any means. It was a tragic accident.
‘It has taken me the best part of four years to remember as much as I do but there are still pieces of the puzzle missing and so many answers I may never find.’
An inquest five months after the tragedy reached the same conclusion. A pathologist found that Mr Bainbridge had died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
Recording a verdict of accidental death, South Cumbria coroner Ian Smith said it was clear the death had been a terrible, tragic and horrid accident.
He added: ‘ Anyone who gets to hear about this inquest should go away with the message that something of this sort, a barbecue in an enclosed area — and this applies to tents as well as solid structures — is not just dangerous, but potentially fatal.’
Jane believes that even if they had been found earlier, it might have been too late for Chris — but it could have lessened the injuries she still battles today.
Roland Wessling, a university lecturer and scientific advisor for Baroness Finlay’s parliamentary report into carbon monoxide, lost his partner in a similar carbon monoxide poisoning incident in 2011 while they were camping on the norfolk Broads.
They had brought a small charcoal barbecue inside their tent five hours after lighting it, believing it to be out.
now he campaigns for Project Shout, a group highlighting the dangers of the noxious gas and encouraging people to install carbon monoxide alarms at home or take them with them camping. Like Jane’s, his advice to those cooking outdoors, especially in the summer months when high spirits can distract from safe behaviour, is unwavering.
‘never cook inside a tent, cabin or gazebo, even if it is raining,’ says Wessling. ‘go several metres from the tent or wherever people are and think about wind direction.
‘even five or ten hours after lighting a barbecue, when there’s virtually no residual heat, gas is being produced. Do not take it inside, ever.’
Wessling describes the trouble he has persuading people to modify their attitudes to carbon monoxide as ‘ostrich syndrome’.
‘In behavioural science it is the “It will never happen to me” attitude. When you’re in holiday mode you think nothing can happen to you. Convincing holidaymakers and campers to be careful is almost impossible.’
While painfully aware that nothing will bring Chris back, his wife is determined that her beloved’s death will not be in vain and hopes their story will cause others to pause for thought.
‘ It is important to me that something is done,’ says Jane. ‘not because it happened to me, but it keeps happening, and it isn’t down to stupidity.’