On February 20th, NBC 5 Chicago ran a story on carbon monoxide poisoning at hotels across the United States. The Waldorf Astoria Chicago has allegedly been exposing their guests to carbon monoxide – an odorless and non visible dangerous gas.
The Waldorf Astoria in Chicago is owned by Walton Street Capital and is under the Hilton brand. This Chicago hotel is world renowned for its elegant interior design including fireplaces in each hotel room. Those fireplaces however, are potentially poisoning customers. There are over 30 online public reviews about this issue, spanning from 2012 until February 2020.
NBC 5 interviewed a couple by the names of Luke Gawne and Eric Fumo, who stayed at the Hilton owned hotel in 2019. It was during their stay that they were apparently awakened by the carbon monoxide detector in their room. Both Mr. Gawne and Ms. Fumo proceeded to become violently ill. The building engineer confirmed ON VIDEO that carbon monoxide was present in their hotel room.
Carbon monoxide detectors generally do not trigger until a dangerous amount of carbon monoxide has been in the air. Normally it takes 8 hours at 50 parts per million (PPM) for a detector to even trigger. The fact that these detectors are reportedly going off so frequently at the Waldorf Astoria Chicago, might signal a very real and dangerous problem for guests.
The hotel responded publicly to NBC saying that all the instances of reported alarms going off are “false alarms”.
This claim is directly contradicted by NBC’s video showing the Waldorf building engineer saying that there was indeed carbon monoxide build up in Mr. Gawne and Ms. Fumo’s hotel room AND that this happens “every nights” at the hotel.
It remains to be seen if this problem will be further addressed by Hilton. Until then, we caution everyone to stay someone safer.
There has also been a page on Facebook called “Carbon Monoxide in Waldorf Astoria Chicago Hotel Hilton” dedicated to spreading light to the immediate public health risk.
