As global warming continues to push summer temperatures ever upward for abnormally long stretches of time across the country, more Americans are experiencing severe burns from contact with outdoor surfaces.
Particularly in the Southwest, where many people have moved into its rapidly expanding cities, burn rates have shown to be exceptionally high, according to records from medical centers.
In 2022, the largest burn center in the Southwest, the Arizona Burn Center at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix, admitted 85 patients for contact burns over the summer. Last year, as Phoenix went through 31 straight days of temperatures above 110 degrees, that number climbed to 136 patients, 14 of whom died. This year, the center has already treated 50 patients, and four of them died, The NY Times reported.
Syed Saquib, medical director of the burn care center at University Medical Center, told The Times that before he moved to Las Vegas from Jacksonville, Fla., eight years ago, he was unfamiliar with the burn problem. Now, his center admits one or two such patients daily in the summer. Last Thursday, about half of the 31 patients hospitalized with burns had suffered pavement burns.
When the air temperature in Las Vegas reaches 115 degrees, which it did for seven consecutive days last week, the pavement temperature can go up to 160 degrees, Sean Collins, assistant fire chief of emergency medical services for Clark County, told The Times. At this intensity, it takes just a few seconds of contact to sustain second-degree burn, and a few minutes to get a third-degree burn. In the most severe cases, a pavement burn can affect the underlying muscle and even bone.
Phoenix is the country’s fastest growing city, and the Las Vegas metro area has added more than 300,00 residents in the past decade, according to population estimates. Asphalt is a common culprit for contact burns, which absorbs about 95 percent of the sun’s radiation, and covers much of the sprawling urban landscape.
However, Kevin Foster, the director of the Arizona Burn Center, says these burns can often be avoided by staying out of the sun during the hottest hours of the day, letting people know your whereabouts if you must go outside, and staying hydrated. This advice however, does not help the homeless population, who make up a great portion of the burn victims.
