FORT CARSON, Colo.-Sometimes it really pays off to follow one's nose.
Fort Carson Family Housing Kiowa Village Mayor Jennifer Isbill and Deputy Mayor Aimee Brooks smelled natural gas near one of the buildings in their housing area Feb. 5 as they were delivering the village newsletter door-to-door.
Had they smelled it a couple of weeks earlier they might not have given it a second thought.
"I believe that's probably something we would have smelled and kind of dismissed," Isbill said. "You smell something odd and you just keep walking."
Fortunately for the residents of the building, Isbill and Brooks - along with representatives from Fort Carson's other housing areas - attended Community Emergency Response Team training a week earlier. Among other things, the training covered what to do in the event of a gas leak.
Since the smell of gas was coming from a pipe that was close to an outside purge line, the two waited a minute to be sure the line wasn't simply purging.
"We knelt down to where the pipes connect, and Jennifer noticed there was a gap in that area," Brooks said. "It continued to smell strongly of gas, and that's when we decided to go ahead and call the fire department."
While Isbill called the Fort Carson fire department, Brooks knocked on each of the housing units in the building to get the residents outside.Only one resident was home.
"She was very thankful that we had noticed the leak," Isbill said.
The fire crew arrived moments after Isbill called emergency services.
"When they got there, the (firefighters) ran their tests and confirmed that there was a gas leak," Brooks said. "When they came, they said: 'Don't ever be embarrassed. Don't ever think that it's not important.'
"In our case, we were: 'Should we; shouldn't we'' for a hot second. We remembered them saying (in the CERT training) it's never wrong to call them out. That's what we did, and it turned out being the right thing to do."
A maintenance crew from Balfour Beatty Communities, which operates the Family housing, arrived moments later and shut off the gas to the entire building.
After they were dismissed by the emergency crews, Isbill and Brooks continued passing out their newsletters, pondering how the day could have turned out.
"Who knows what could have happened with this gas leak," Isbill said. "It could have turned out to be major if somebody was walking by smoking a cigarette and that gas would have lit - you would have had a major problem."
Isbill and Brooks credit the day's positive outcome to their CERT training.
"Before that training, we would have not had a clue what to do," Brooks said. "That was tremendous. That training was well worth it."
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