AN Urmston teacher whose close friend died suddenly due to carbon monoxide poisoning nearly suffered the same fate recently.

And Lucy Chant's experience has spurred her to increase her efforts to raise awareness of the 'silent killer'.

Her friend Katie Haines, who was 31 and had recently been married, got into the bath after a long day at work in February 2010.

As she was getting out it is believed she was engulfed by a cloud of carbon monoxide, collapsed, hit her head, fell into the water and drowned.

Her husband Richard returned home shortly after and was unable to save her.

Lucy, 33, who teaches at Wright Robinson College in Gorton, could have suffered the same fate on November 1 if she had not had a carbon monoxide detector installed following Katie’s death.

Lucy said: “On the Thursday morning of half term, I got out of bed and headed to the kitchen to make breakfast, as I walked into the kitchen, our carbon monoxide detector started going off.

“It showed high levels of CO being given out by our boiler - it was reading 600 on the digital detector.

"If we didn't have an alarm, we could have been dead within 3 hours."

Because of what happeened to Katie, Lucy and her husband Dan knew the best course of action was to open all their windows, turn off the boiler and evacuate the house.

However, many people do not know this, which is why Katie’s family and husband set up the Katie Haines Memorial Trust following her death, in order to promote the importance of installing carbon monoxide detectors.

They recently made a film to demonstrate this, which can be found at youtube.com/watch?v=T9_auaoxHzY&feature=share, more information can be found at katiehaines.com.

Lucy said: “If it wasn't for Katie's story, we wouldn't have had a CO detector.I believe she saved my life that day.”