PHOENIX — Ron Falk lost his right leg, underwent extensive skin grafting on his left and remains to be recovering after collapsing a 12 months in a while the sweltering asphalt outside a Phoenix supermarket where he had stopped for a chilly lemonade during a heat wave.
Now confined to a wheelchair and having lost his job and residential, the 62-year-old is recovering at a medical recovery center for patients with nowhere else to go. There he’s receiving physical therapy and treatment for a bacterial infection in what stays of his right leg, which is simply too swollen to support the prosthetic he had hoped would allow him to walk again.
“If you can't cool down somewhere, the heat gets to you,” says Falk, who lost consciousness from heat stroke. “Then you don't know what's going to happen, like in my case.”
Hot sidewalks and unshaded playgrounds pose the danger of burns as air temperatures reach recent summer highs in Southwest cities like Phoenix, which just recorded the most well liked June on record. The average each day high was 110 degrees Fahrenheit, with no 24-hour periods below 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Young children, the elderly and the homeless are particularly prone to contact burns, which might occur inside seconds when the skin touches a surface that’s 82 °C (180 °F).
Since early June, 50 people have been hospitalized with such burns and 4 have died at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix. Valleywise Health Medical Center operates the most important burn center within the Southwest and treats patients from Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Southern California and Texas, in response to its director, Dr. Kevin Foster. About 80 percent of those injured got here from the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Last 12 months, the middle admitted 136 patients with superficial burns from June to August, and 85 in the course of the same period in 2022, Foster said. Fourteen died. One in five was homeless.
“Last year's record heat wave left an alarming number of patients with life-threatening burns,” Foster said of a 31-day period that included all of July last 12 months when temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more during Phoenix's hottest summer on record.
A map released this week by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California highlights just how hot surfaces like asphalt and concrete are getting within the Phoenix metropolitan area. The data visualizing land surface temperatures was collected on the afternoon of June 19 by a NASA instrument aboard the International Space Station that measures thermal infrared emissions from the Earth's surface. The yellows, reds and purples of hot urban areas on the map contrast with cooler green areas.
In Las Vegas, where summer temperatures commonly reach triple digits, 22 people were hospitalized at University Medical Center's Lions Burn Care Center in June alone, spokesman Scott Kerbs said. That's nearly half the variety of 46 hospitalizations during all of last summer.
Like Phoenix, Las Vegas experiences hours of desert sun, frying outdoor surfaces like asphalt, concrete, and metal doors on cars, in addition to playground equipment like swings and jungle gyms.
Victims of superficial burns often include children who’ve been injured by walking barefoot on scorching hot concrete or touching hot surfaces, adults who’ve collapsed on the sidewalk while drunk, and elderly individuals who have fallen to the sidewalk resulting from heat stroke or other medical emergency.
Some don’t survive.
Thermal injuries were among the many primary or contributing causes of 645 heat-related deaths last 12 months in Maricopa County, which incorporates Phoenix.
One of the victims was an 82-year-old woman with dementia and heart disease who was admitted to a hospital in a Phoenix suburb after she was found on the scorching hot asphalt on an August day in temperatures as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit.
With a body temperature of 40.5 degrees, the girl was admitted to hospital with second-degree burns on her back and right side, covering 8% of her body. She died three days later.
Many patients with superficial burns also suffered potentially fatal heat stroke.
The emergency department at Valleywise Hospital recently introduced a brand new protocol for all heat stroke victims: to quickly lower the patient's body temperature, they’re immersed in a bag of ice slurry.
Patients with skin burns often had a protracted recovery time, requiring quite a few skin grafts and other surgeries after which spending months recovering in nursing homes or rehabilitation facilities.
Bob Woolley, 71, suffered second- and third-degree burns to his hands, arms, legs and torso when he stumbled into the scorching hot rock garden within the backyard of his Phoenix home wearing only swimming trunks and a tank top.
“The ordeal was extremely painful; it was almost unbearable,” said Woolley, who was within the Valleywise burn center for several months. He said he considers himself “95% recovered” after extensive skin grafts and physical therapy and has resumed some previous activities, akin to swimming and riding motorcycles.
Some of the burn victims in each Phoenix and Las Vegas were children.
“In many cases, it involves young children walking or crawling on hot surfaces,” Kerbs said of the patients stationed on the Las Vegas center.
Foster said about 20 percent of the skin burn victims treated on the Phoenix center, each inpatients and outpatients, are children.
Young children don’t realize the damage that a hot metal doorknob or a scorching hot sidewalk can do.
“Because they're playing, they're not paying attention,” says urban climatologist Ariane Middel, assistant professor at Arizona State University and leader of the SHaDE Lab, a research team studying the consequences of urban heat.
“Maybe they don’t even notice that it’s hot.”
When measuring the surface temperatures of playground equipment, the team found that a slide at 37.7 °C (100 °F) can heat as much as 71.1 °C (160 °F) without shade, but a canopy can reduce that temperature to 43.8 °C (111 °F). A rubber ground cover can reach as much as 86.6 °C (188 °F), a handrail can heat as much as 48.8 °C (120 °F), and concrete can reach as much as 55.5 °C (132 °F).
Many parks within the Phoenix metropolitan area have covered picnic tables and plastic sheets over playground equipment that keep metal or plastic surfaces as much as 30 degrees cooler. But that's not the case in lots of parks, Middel says.
She said cooler wood chips are higher for the ground than rubber mats, that are designed to guard children from head injuries but absorb heat within the scorching sun. Like rubber, artificial turf heats up faster than asphalt.
“We need to think about alternative surface types because most of the surfaces we use for our infrastructure are thermal sponges,” said Middel.
Hot concrete and asphalt also pose a risk of burns for pets.
While recovering at Circle the City in Phoenix, a short-term care facility where he was sent after being released from Valleywise's burn unit, Falk said he never imagined the Phoenix heat could cause him to collapse on the sweltering asphalt in shorts and a T-shirt.
Because he had no ID or phone with him, nobody knew where he was for months. He still has a protracted technique to go, but still hopes to resume a few of his old life, working for an entertainment concessionaire.
“I went into a kind of downward spiral,” Falk admitted. “When I finally woke up, I thought, 'Hey, wait, I lost a leg.' But that doesn't mean you're useless.”
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