A Phoenix-area mother wants to warn other parents after her 9-month-old boy was accidentally sprayed with scalding hot water coming from the garden hose, causing second-degree burns to about 30 percent of his body.
“It’s heartbreaking. It is. It sucks,” Dominique Woodger said. "All of it was peeling. He had blisters all over the right side."
Woodger said she was about to fill a little pool with water on Monday, as she normally does.
When she turned on the faucet, the extremely hot water came out of the sprinkler head attached to the hose, getting all over her baby who was sitting on the ground.
"I thought he was crying because he was mad, because he hates when he gets sprayed in the face. I didn't think that it was burning him,” Woodger said.
These are the kinds of contact burns Phoenix firefighters see often. When it's 115 degrees outside, the water sitting in a hose under the sun could be as hot as 150 degrees, according to Capt. Larry Subervi.
"So at those temperatures, something as short as a 10 or 30 second exposure can result in a second-degree burn,” Subervi said.
The most common contact burn they see is from people walking on hot pavement. He said if a burn breaks the skin, that's when a person should get medical treatment.
Woodger said doctors say her baby will be okay, but she doesn't want other parents or children to experience the same pain.
"Just be careful. Just touch it (the water) before you spray-- before you let your kids near it,” Woodger said – advice that she says she wished she would have taken before it caused her son pain.
