Rancho Mirage restaurant reopens after Carbon Monoxide incident
A Rancho Mirage restaurant is operating normally after a carbon monoxide incident sickened a few employees.
Over the last week, some employees began experiencing headaches and nausea. Some employees say they originally mistook the symptoms and thought they were heat-related.
“Once we were all having the same symptoms — the nausea, the massive headaches…we all kind of thought it was something else. And so we told the managers and they said, ‘Okay, well we’re going to have an investigation done.’ And we did, and for some reason, nothing came back,” said Andrew Engel, a Burgers & Beer Employee.
As a result, management told us they called a gas detection company on Friday. However, after a site inspection, no leaks were detected by the company.
On Saturday morning, a man was taken by ambulance from Burgers & Beer restaurant on Dinah Shore after suffering “minor symptoms” from possible carbon monoxide exposure, and another employee self-transported to the hospital, according to Cal Fire.
“I would think that the fire department would require them to have carbon monoxide detectors along with the smoke detectors,” said Troy Unterein, a Customer at Burgers & Beer. However, California State law does not currently require restaurants to have carbon monoxide detectors.
Manager Daniel Quiroga from the restaurant said they discovered the problem when a water heater wasn’t working properly and then called the fire department. Firefighters reported “an occupied restaurant with positive carbon monoxide monitor reading.”
Burgers & Beer was evacuated and there have been no other reports of illness.
“I’ve been eating at Burgers & Beer since they started out in El Centro […] Their food has always been fabulous, they treat everyone wonderful […] this doesn’t deter us at all,” said Burgers & Beer customer Shawn Raether.
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