The article quotes Kevin Foster, director of the Arizona burn center:
"[M]ost 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. Concrete does not. The temperature stays the same.... It only takes a fraction of a second to get a deep, deep burn. And unfortunately, a lot of the patients that we’re seeing have laid on hot stuff for minutes, sometimes hours.... Patients oftentimes will suffer central nervous system injuries.... The burns can cook their brains or spinal cord, peripheral nerves, cause liver failure, kidney failure, bowels not to work correctly. 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.”
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On the other hand you can cook eggs on it.
Pro tip: Don’t sleep on concrete or asphalt.
You can get instant frostbite by spilling gasoline on your hands in sub-zero weather. Unlike water, which stops at 32 degrees while it turns to ice, gasoline stops at minus 40 even if it's only minus ten out.
Go to Google. Type in "old people with tattoos". Report back and tell us what you saw.
Phoenix is awash with fentanyl. There may be some connection.
Hot bum in the city
Leftwing policies make it gritty
"Phoenix is awash with fentanyl. There may be some connection."
Maybe it takes being obliterated on fentanyl to tolerate Phoenix.
an "inch deep" ?? sure! How, exactly, did she measure this ?? invasive exploratory surgery?
Don't do drugs, kids.
Our ex-brother-in-law lived, after his divorce, in his house with his granddaughter. He fell in the driveway (asphalt) one day while she was at school, and because of previous back injuries, was unable to get up. Most of his neighbors were at work so he was there for hours. He didn't have his phone with him. Finally when his granddaughter got home, she called 911 and he went to USC Medical Center where he stayed for weeks. Later he was transferred to Loma Linda where he got better enough to a stay with his son and family, but never fully recovered. He passed about a year later. Temps on the say he fell were in the 90s in SoCal, so even though it wasn't a record heat day, the length of time he was on the driveway resulted in very serious injuries.
What people don’t know about quantum electrodynamics is amazing.
To follow up on Old and Slow, it's the fentanyl + tranq combination. They pass out and don't move at all. People fall and seem to be in uncomfortable positions, but they don't move until the drug(s) wear off. In the heat and cold, this will pose serious problems, in addition to the problems the use is already causing in the user's lives and society in general.
"searing sidewalks cause horrific injuries in US"
. . . if you are an insane addict who lies down.
So, as a society, we take no action to clear the hot sidewalks, but then spend $$ to treat the entirely preventable injuries.
Do tattoos make heat injury worse or more likely?
Our black lab used to lie on the concrete -- not the cool decking -- while we swam. He would move into the shade after a while, but his love and tolerance of the heat was amazing.
When we lived in Maine he'd do the same thing in the snow.
tim in vermont said...
"What people don’t know about quantum electrodynamics is amazing."
Guilty
Kate.
Our Siberian Husky would lay out on the deck in 90 deg. weather for hours. Come in for a drink and go right back out again.
There's a spike in the number burns because there's a spike in the number of people passing out on hot sidewalks and roads.
It's not like ordinary, unsuspecting Arizonans are snuggling down for a nap in the street like they have always done and climate change suddenly pounces on them.
I lived in Phoenix for a while back in the 80's. You couldn't walk barefooted on the sidewalks in the summertime. It was too painful. The weather men on the nightly news were always cooking eggs on sidewalks and warning parents not to let their kids go out barefoot. They even warned about pets burning their feet.
You'd have to be pretty well anesthetized to lie down on the pavement in Phoenix in the summertime. No mention of that in the article.
The recent heatwaves in Arizona, stoked by the climate crisis, have led to a spike in contact burns from asphalt almost as hot as boiling water
Are we to believe this wasn't a problem in previous years?
Or was "asphalt is hot and will burn you" a dog-bites-man story without a climate change angle?
I worked with one of my reps in Phoenix once when it got to 117 degrees. IDGF if it's a dry heat. Touching anything could burn you. He said he would pick me up at the hotel at 5:30 AM. I said What? He said that the businesses we were calling on closed at 2PM due to heat.
I walked out of the hotel at pitch black 5:30 AM & the sliding doors on the Hampton felt like an oven door opening. Holy shit. I spend the day questioning his sanity & how he dealt with it.
You can't leave ANYTHING in your car. Why don't the windows blow out? He said, you should come back in winter. I said when 1" of rain floods the dry riverbeds? No thank you.
Of course my HQ was in Minnesota & I've been there at -31 degrees, so it's perspective.
From the article:
"Temperatures in the city of Phoenix reached at least 110F (43.3C) for 31 days in a row this summer. 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."
Yeah it gets hot in Phoenix. The typical daily high temperature is over 100 degrees for four months of the year, every year. So if it was 98F, the guy in the article was injured on a cooler than average day. I'm not seeing where his injury is due to the "climate crisis" (mentioned in the article twice) that's got so many peoples' knickers in a twist.
You know what would have happened if you fell asleep on concrete in Phoenix in the Summer of 1923? Exactly the same thing.
"You can get instant frostbite by spilling gasoline on your hands in sub-zero weather."
Yes. Worst frostbite I ever got was when I accidentally spilled some dry ice/actone mix (-78 C) on my right pinky finger's first joint area. Took almost a full year for the skin to completely heal.
Clearly climate change is at fault.
"Blogger Robert Cook said...
Maybe it takes being obliterated on fentanyl to tolerate Phoenix."
Cute Cook. I thought leftists like yourself were all about concern for the downtrodden. The sad fact of the matter is that fentanyl is the cause, not the result.
I do realize that you were just trying to be funny, and I agree that Phoenix is a shithole of a city (I grew up there when it was hot but pretty nice), but what is happening to people on the streets of our cities is fucking tragic. When I go to Phoenix every now and then, the strung out homeless addicts are everywhere. It's a wonder that more aren't dying, and it isn't for a lack of homes.
As everyone else has pointed out, reporters are nitwits. (Or knowingly corrupt liars) 2020 was just as bad (IMO worse than 2023 because it heated up sooner) yet they were all too busy making s*** up about Covid to notice.
If there's a "spike" in heat-related injuries it's due to the drugs, period. Everybody down here knows not to touch nearly anything that's in the sun during Summer. Businesses put cloth over door handles, fer Chrissakes.
Their little brains just can't deal with anything unless they can stick a "climate crisis" on it.
If you fall asleep on the right place, where the cracks in the sidewalk intersect, you can get some really good sear marks.
To serve man...
OTOH, here in the mountains a few hours from Phoenix we have had a cooler summer than last year. Usually 20+ degrees cooler than Phoenix.
Should we be worried that the director of a burn center has no idea how heat transfer works?
Technically, it is true when hot things touch skin they cool as the heat flows into the skin/body, but if there is a large thermal mass there to keep heat flowing toward the point of contact, then the heat lost is quickly replaced from warmer areas of the thermal mass.
On the flip side, they build roads on rip rap so that the cold air can get beneath them and keep them frozen all winter rather than them heating/melting in the sun and from use creating an icy water mix.
Unless the movie The Incident is coming to life, these are not normal people laying on the sidewalk. Frying eggs on the sidewalk is an old, old expression, it's not new to climate whatever. Mental institutions were closed because they were so awful. Now that we have the people who belong in those institutions on the streets, we can see why they were so awful.
"Maybe it takes being obliterated on fentanyl to tolerate Phoenix."
For all you people even thinking about it, this is good advice. Do not move to Phoenix. Or if you do, get your fentanyl dealer lined up in advance. This city - this state - is every bit as awful, horrible, miserable, hot and evil as you have been told. Maybe worse.
Yet people are coming here - every damn day - from California, Illinois, New York... Why they would leave paradise to come to this pestilential shithole is beyond human understanding.
Bob Boyd said...
There's a spike in the number burns because there's a spike in the number of people passing out on hot sidewalks and roads.
It's not like ordinary, unsuspecting Arizonans are snuggling down for a nap in the street like they have always done and climate change suddenly pounces on them.
These people are almost always on heavy duty drugs. When I was a surgery resident at LA County we got a guy who passed out in a tree. He was lying with his forehead on his arm. His forehead had a full thickness skin necrosis and his forearm had a compartment syndrome from the hours of pressure. When the anesthesiologist put him to sleep his mouth was full of leaves.
On another occasion, I had a guy come in who had passed out in front of a room air conditioner. For hours. He was hypothermic and died before we could get him rewarmed enough. His body temp on admission was about 86, as I recall.
When I go to Phoenix every now and then, the strung out homeless addicts are everywhere. It's a wonder that more aren't dying, and it isn't for a lack of homes.
Why I live in Tucson.
This is stupid. You would get burned falling asleep on concrete in the southwest in summer ever since there has been concrete in the southwest.
So are we supposed to believe that all of a sudden temperatures are so much warmer that hot pavement in the desert has become a problem where it wasn't before? Uh huh, ok.
I lived in Phoenix for 20 years and I found most.of the reporting from the NYT and WP tone hyperbolic nonsense....look somebody grabbed a metal handrail at high noon with their bare hand and hurt it. Ooooo. The concrete can burn, yes it can. One July day on bet I walked the 200 feet to the mailbox. Nothing serious but never again.
The big problem is just the length of the season. I got tired of the heat around this time of the year when the humidity was high enough to prevent cooling at night and the pool was bathwater warm In a few weeks there will be the first sign of fall as the overnights fall into 70s and you can overseed the yard
110 is fine... 115 and above gets warm. Back in the day when I would go to DC on business I would melt with the high humidity but I had no problem when I got home,playing golf at 110, 112. You deal with it and don't whine like a little girl... Or are you from CA?
And no you cannot fry an egg. I tried that on the tarmac in Yuma when it was 125 and it doesn't work
Addicts and Eggs, breakfast of champions in Phoenix.
"Fell asleep" and "tattoos."
Billions of people all over the world live in cities with a tropical climate. Almost none fall asleep on hot concrete.
That and the many tatoos means drugs.
“ What people don’t know about quantum electrodynamics is amazing.”
If you want to learn a bit about Quantum Electrodynamics, look at the Feynman lectures on U Tube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPDP_8X5Hug
Then you may be interested in Quantum Chromodynamics, which is the theory of the strong interaction between quarks mediated by gluons.
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