2nd or 3rd degree burn11/12/2023 ![]() ![]() When patients are brought in, the team hurries to action. So we have to deal with that too, the systemic manifestations of that, which can be really severe and oftentimes end up causing more problems for patients than the actual burn does.” “The burns can cook their brains or spinal cord, peripheral nerves, cause liver failure, kidney failure, bowels not to work correctly. “Patients oftentimes will suffer central nervous system injuries,” Foster said. People walk through the ‘the Zone’, Phoenix’s largest unhoused encampment, amid the city’s worst heatwave on record on 26 July 2023. And unfortunately, a lot of the patients that we’re seeing have laid on hot stuff for minutes, sometimes hours.” “It only takes a fraction of a second to get a deep, deep burn. What makes these burns particularly destructive, he said, is that “most other things that are hot, once they come in contact with the skin, they tend to cool down – you know, liquids and flames and things like that. “So it’s just a little bit below the boiling point of water.” The temperature of hot asphalt “on a sunny August afternoon in Phoenix can be 170 or 180 degrees”, he said. And it’s not just the ambient temperature, 110 to 115 degrees, it’s also the bright sunlight on them and no clouds.” “The pavement, the asphalt, concrete, sidewalks, rocks, they get hot. It’s because of the surfaces people are falling or otherwise landing on. The problem with contact burns, he said, “is they’re almost always deep – at least the contact burns that we’re seeing”. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Imagesĭr Kevin Foster, director of the Arizona burn center, has worked at the hospital for 24 years. Phoenix paramedics transport a resident to the hospital during a heatwave in July 2023. Other high risk groups include people who are unhoused, and those who consume drugs and alcohol and become unaware of their surroundings. ![]() And there have been several times as many cases of milder burns that haven’t required admitting to the facility.Ĭontact burns can affect anyone, with the very young and very old particularly at risk. This is approaching the record from recent years of 92 cases in 2020, another year of harsh heatwaves. From June to mid-August, 85 serious cases of contact burns have been treated at the hospital. The burn unit is always busy, but this summer has been particularly rough. It is the only nationally verified burn unit in the state and draws patients from all over the south-western US. Many of these cases are brought to Valleywise Health’s Arizona burn center, where Hunt was treated. But even on a 98F (37C) day, like the one when Hunt was injured, sustained contact with the sidewalk can result in third degree burns – and potentially kill a person. Temperatures in the city of Phoenix reached at least 110F (43.3C) for 31 days in a row this summer. Alongside heat exhaustion and the more serious heat stroke, there is also a summertime spike in another kind of injury: contact burns from superheated pavements and other urban surfaces. Recent heatwaves in the US, stoked by the climate crisis, have caused a surge of heat-related injuries and deaths. Hunt pulls the leg of his khaki shorts up to reveal a large, red rectangle where skin from his thigh was removed and grafted on to his back. The burn appears to be about an inch deep, and mars the swath of intricate, black-inked tattoos of skulls and faces that once covered his back.īelow the big scar, a bandage covers another wound on his lower back. He lifts his white T-shirt to reveal a lopsided, round scar the size of a medium pizza. “What am I doing here?” he recalled asking.Īlmost three months later, Hunt stands in the empty chapel of Circle the City, the central Phoenix medical shelter for unhoused people where he’s been recuperating. He doesn’t remember much, just the bright lights. ![]()
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