The Deaths That Come When an Industry's Left to Regulate Itself

After Hurricane Irma hit three months ago in Orlando, Florida, the local police got a desperate 911 call from a 12-year-old boy reporting that his mother and siblings were unconscious. Fumes overcame the first deputy who rushed to the scene. After the police arrived at the property, they found Jan Lebron Diaz, age 13, Jan’s older sister Kiara, 16, and their mother Desiree, 34, lying dead, poisoned from carbon monoxide emitted by their portable generator. Four others in the house went to the hospital. If 12-year-old Louis hadn’t made that call, they might have died, too.

Portable generators release more carbon monoxide—which is particularly dangerous because it is odorless and invisible—than most cars. As a result, the devices can kill efficiently and quickly, though accidentally. The Diaz family usually placed the generator properly, outside the house, a neighbor told local reporters. But for some reason, they had brought it into their garage. From there, the generator’s murderous byproduct spread silently through the house.

During hurricanes, floods, and nor’easters, portable generators save lives—except when they take them. Irma, Harvey, and Maria all left thousands without power and reliant on their portable generators. The government has not yet done its official count, but 11 people using these generators died just from Irma, according to preliminary government estimates. Many more died from Harvey and Maria, experts say, especially in Puerto Rico, which has been without a functioning power grid for months.

These deaths rarely merit more than short stories on local news sites. Civil servants then accumulate the statistics into dry reports that end up buried somewhere on .gov websites. The latest of these shows that portable generators have killed on average 70 people a year since 2005. That’s a small fraction of the toll from car accidents. Still, generators rank as one of the deadliest consumer products on the market. A further 2,800 people a year suffer from carbon-monoxide poisoning caused by the equipment.

Portable-generator deaths are preventable, and for the past 16-plus years, the United States government has tried to do just that. The job has fallen to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which, with its $126 million budget and 520 employees, oversees almost every product Americans use in their home, office, or out in