Anne Arundel County fire officials took a Jessup resident to the hospital Sunday morning for carbon monoxide poisoning related to use of a generator.

Firefighters responded to a call for help at the Holiday Mobile Estates in Jessup at approximately 7:38 a.m. Sunday.

"The community is without power and they were using a [portable] generator," Lt. Keith Hamilton said. "We had one adult suffering the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning."

The resident from the 7800 block of Clark Road was transported to the hyperbaric chamber at the University of Maryland's Hospital in Baltimore with serious, life-threatening injures.

A hyperbaric chamber is an "encapsulated tub almost like a little submarine that you can put an individual in," said Hamilton. "They were developed by the Navy to treat divers suffering from the bends. We use that now as therapy for helping individuals with too much [carbon monoxide] in their system."

Tips to prevent carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning:

• "When a generator is in operation, it should be 10 to 15 feet from your house," Hamilton said. 
• "You don’t want to have any windows open on that side of that house because that generator is producing a high volume of chemicals," he added. One of those chemicals is CO, which is odorless and can be deadly to humans.
• Purchase carbon monoxide detectors, which can run for days on a battery backup system. 

Some of the symptoms of CO poisoning include massive headaches, nausea, increased pulse rate and irritability.