PHOENIX (AP) — Ron Falk lost his right leg, underwent extensive skin grafting on his left and is still recovering a year after collapsing on the scorching asphalt outside a Phoenix supermarket where he had stopped for a cold lemonade during a heat wave.
Now confined to a wheelchair and having lost his job and home, the 62-year-old is recovering at a medical recovery center for patients with nowhere else to go. There he is receiving physical therapy and treatment for a bacterial infection in what remains of his right leg, which is 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 happening, like in my case.”
READ MORE: Summer camps adapt their outdoor activities to protect children during the heatwave
Hot sidewalks and unshaded playgrounds pose the risk of burns as air temperatures reach new summer highs in Southwest cities like Phoenix, which just recorded the hottest June on record. The average daily high was 110 degrees Fahrenheit, with no 24-hour periods below 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Young children, the elderly and the homeless are particularly at risk of contact burns, which can occur within seconds when the skin touches a surface that is 82 °C (180 °F).
Since early June, 50 people have been hospitalized with such burns and four have died at Valleywise Health Medical Center in Phoenix. Valleywise Health Medical Center operates the largest burn center in the Southwest and treats patients from Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Southern California and Texas, according to its director, Dr. Kevin Foster. About 80 percent of those injured came from the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Last year, the center admitted 136 patients with superficial burns from June to August, and 85 during 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 year when temperatures reached 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more during Phoenix’s hottest summer on record.
In Las Vegas, where summer temperatures regularly 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 number 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, as well as playground equipment like swings and jungle gyms.
Victims of superficial burns often include children who have been injured by walking barefoot on scorching hot concrete or touching hot surfaces, adults who have collapsed on the sidewalk while drunk, and elderly people who have fallen to the sidewalk due to heat stroke or other medical emergency.
Some do not survive.
Thermal injuries were among the primary or contributing causes of 645 heat-related deaths last year in Maricopa County, which includes 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.
READ MORE: Dangerous heat waves in California and the southern United States
With a body temperature of 40.5 degrees, the woman 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 new protocol for all heat stroke victims: To quickly lower the patient’s body temperature, they are immersed in a bag of ice slush.
Patients with skin burns often had a long recovery time, requiring numerous skin grafts and other surgeries and then 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 in 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 in the Valleywise burn center for several months. He said he considers himself “95 percent recovered” after extensive skin grafts and physical therapy and has resumed some previous activities, such as swimming and riding motorcycles.
Some of the burn victims in both Phoenix and Las Vegas were children.
READ MORE: Street medicine teams in Arizona provide intravenous hydration to homeless people during extreme heat
“In many cases, it involves young children walking or crawling on hot surfaces,” Kerbs said of the patients stationed at the Las Vegas center.
Foster said about 20 percent of the skin burn victims treated at the Phoenix center, both inpatients and outpatients, are children.
Young children do not 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, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who leads the SHaDE Lab, a research team studying the effects of heat in cities.
“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 up to 71.1 °C (160 °F) without shade, but a cover can reduce that temperature to 43.8 °C (111 °F). A rubber ground cover can reach up to 86.6 °C (188 °F), a handrail can heat up to 48.8 °C (120 °F), and concrete can reach up to 55.5 °C (132 °F).
Many parks in the Phoenix metropolitan area have covered picnic tables and plastic sheets over playground equipment that keep metal or plastic surfaces up to 30 degrees cooler. But that’s not the case in many parks, Middel says.
She said cooler wood chips are better for the floor than rubber mats, which are designed to protect children from head injuries but absorb heat in 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.
Veterinarians recommend that dogs wear boots to protect their paws when walking outside in the summer, or let them walk on cooler grassy areas. Owners are also advised to make sure their pets drink plenty of water and don’t overheat. On days when the National Weather Service issues a heat warning, dogs are banned from the city’s popular walking trails.
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, no one knew where he was for months. He still has a long way to go, but still hopes to resume some of his old life, working for an entertainment concessionaire.
“I went into a kind of downward spiral,” Falk admitted. “I finally woke up and said, ‘Hey, wait, I lost a leg.’ But that doesn’t mean you’re useless.”
