The Gas Safety Trust has reached agreement with OFTEC, the oil firing technical association, and HETAS, the solid fuel domestic heating association, to extend the process used to report domestic CO related gas incidents, to cover those resulting from solid fuel and oil installations as well.
The agreement, facilitated by the Gas Safety Trust and Downstream Gas, will lay the foundation upon which authoritative statistics can be reported, collated and analysed for all the main carbon-based fuels, the results of which will be published by the Gas Safety Trust in their 2011 annual CO incident report.

'Our partnership with OFTEC and HETAS represents a huge step towards understanding and reducing CO incidents nationwide,' said Nigel Dumbrell of the Gas Safety Trust.

'For the first time, we will be able to assess more effectively the causes of CO incidents across all fossil fuels used for heating and cooking in the home environment. In particular it will enable us to evaluate more comprehensively the issues of most concern and especially those individuals most at risk.'

OFTEC and HETAS will provide CO incident data starting this month (July 2010) for inclusion in the Trust's 2010/11 annual CO incident report, which will be published in October 2011.

'While there is no official procedure for reporting CO-related incidents in the solid fuel, wood and biomass industry, HETAS is moving to a position where it will provide a central investigation and reporting service for HSE, police and coroners,' added Bruce Allen, HETAS chief executive.

'Adopting the reporting process is a positive step forward to uniform way of gathering statistics across the fuel sectors. We believe that the first combined report published by the Gas Safety Trust in partnership with Downstream Gas next year will be valuable to all concerned with CO Safety and awareness,' he insisted.

'The reporting system offers us a tried and tested mechanism to record data for inclusion in the Trust's annual CO report,' commented Adrian Lightwood, OFTEC's inspection service manager. 'Its findings will provide an important benchmark against which we can compare the numbers and causes of CO incidents involving domestic oil installations into the future.'

The Gas Safety Trust will publish the 2009/2010 report on gas related CO incidents only in October 2010. The first combined report featuring all fossil fuel related CO incidents will be published by the Trust in October 2011.