5 Chimney Dangers That Can Put You in the Hospital. Number 3 Grows on the Shelf Above Your Damper

Sometime in July you heard it. A scratching behind the damper at dusk, or a chittering down the flue at five in the morning. Now it is October, the nights are in the forties, and this week you are going to light the first fire of the year. The thing that spent the summer in your chimney is not what puts you in the hospital. It is what it left behind, and the first fire is what sends it into the room. Five things can be waiting in a chimney that sat unused since April. The glaze you already know about, and why it is a February problem and not a first-night one. The nest, who most likely built it if you live east of the Mississippi, and why October is the only month you are allowed to take it out. The one that may still be hanging on the smoke shelf, and the number from the CDC that changed how I think about it. The crack nobody checks. And the fifth, which is the dust on the shelf behind your damper, what grows in it over a summer, and what happened to a widow on the Back Mountain road in 1988 who did everything right. Before the first fire: look, wet, mask, bag, cap. I will walk you through each one. Harlan Sawyer. Sawyer Ridge, Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five Octobers cleaning this chimney, most of them wrong. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. A note before anybody writes in: I am not a doctor and I am not your fire marshal. If the smoke shelf has more than a light dusting on it, do not clean it yourself. Call a CSIA certified sweep. Anyone in your house with a weakened immune system should not be in the room during cleanup. If you have had a cough and fever two or three weeks after cleaning a chimney, tell your doctor you cleaned a chimney. That one sentence changes what they look for. Sources for what is in this video: CDC on histoplasmosis causes and statistics, Illinois Department of Public Health histoplasmosis fact sheet, CDC MMWR on human rabies in the United States, Missouri Department of Conservation on chimney swifts, Chimney Safety Institute of America on creosote and inspections.