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We are now living in an Age of Emergency

Recent heat waves , stoked by the climate crisis, have caused a surge of heat-related injuries and deaths. 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.

I once visited a temple in North India along with my class-mates on a hot summer afternoon. The temperature was above 40 degree Centigrade. Before entering the premises, we removed our shoes. We had to walk a furlong on granite slabs that were like burning coals. We literally ran across the distance but I developed blisters on my under-feet areas. I suffered for a long time because of these blisters.

But even on a 98F (37C) day, sustained contact with the sidewalk can result in third degree burns – and potentially kill a person.

With an increase in global temperature now, serious cases of contact burns are being treated at the hospitals around the world everyday.

Contact burns can affect anyone, with the very young and very old particularly at risk. Other high risk groups include people who are unhoused, and those who consume drugs and alcohol and become unaware of their surroundings.

The problem with contact burns is they’re almost always deep.

It’s because of the surfaces people are falling or otherwise landing on.

The pavement, the asphalt, concrete, sidewalks, rocks, they get hot. And it’s not just the ambient temperature, 110 to 115 degrees [that heats them], it’s also the bright sunlight on them and no clouds.

The temperature of hot asphalt on a sunny mid-summer afternoon can be 170 or 180 degrees F. So it’s just a little bit below the boiling point of water.

What makes these burns particularly destructive is that most other things that are hot, once they come in contact with the skin, they tend to cool down – liquids and flames and things like that. Concrete does not. The temperature stays the same.

The damage can happen quickly.

It only takes a fraction of a second to get a deep, deep burn.

Internal injuries may follow as the contact time increases.

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 doctors 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.

Doctors then remove the burn by excising the damaged skin in surgery.

This leaves a “huge open wound”, so the next step is skin grafting. Skin is removed from a healthy site and grafted on to the burn site; this is repeated until the burn area is covered.

Hospital stays can be lengthy. To calculate, take the percentage of body surface affected by a burn and multiply by two. If a burn covered 25% of someone’s body, they’d likely be in the hospital for 50 days.

The healing process is also far from quick – even when a burn does not require hospitalization.

Recovery could take months.

Some have taken to calling this wave of rolling disaster the new normal. But what the world has experienced over the past months and years is not a new normal – it is just the beginning. Combined with the legacies of centuries of colonial violence and extractive processes, the reckless burning of fossil fuels has pushed the planet into a dangerously unstable new state. We now live in an Age of Emergency that will not end in most of our lifetime.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/aug/28/phoenix-arizona-hea...

https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-mourning-cannot-be-an-endp...

With inputs from Sci-Art-Lab

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