A PSA.

[theweaselking]

CANADIANS understand how public service announcements work. (Warning: Music, sound, and it's a Canadian "workplace safety" PSA. Those are generally pretty gruesome.)

We've gotten the practice at making them good, from centuries of experience in teaching our children to avoid the moose.

Here's another example - it's a catechism that we ensure all schoolchildren know by heart, by the time they're able to spell their own names:
Q: What do we do when we are awake?
A: Keep two eyes on the sky.
Q: What do we do when we sleep?
A: Keep one eye on the sky.
Q: What do we do when we see the moose?
A: Dig hard, dig deep, go for shelter, and never look back.

Comments

[torrain.livejournal.com]

> Of course, my home isn't similar to a professional kitchen, but
> understanding how a specific accident can be prevented helps me
> understand how to prevent accidents in general.

Keep floors from getting slippery (in this specific case, by cleaning up grease spills and not putting the deep-fat fryer in an inconvenient location).

Swear to god, that's the general principle that can be inferred.

> I think the accident was supposed to be her face going into the
> deep fat fryer as she fell,

Rewatched it twice, and I'm really not seeing that.

She's carrying a huge pot. She clearly slips on the stain on the floor, which she has just explained is about to be the cause of her accident. She falls backwards, the contents of the huge pot slop up and over her and one of the huge appliances in the back (apparently a stove, since those tend to have heating elements on top and *something* causes the contents to catch fire), and the closest she ever gets to any of the big appliances is when her left shoulder bounces off the one to her left on the way down.

> That's really just a meaningless details observation, though.

Well, it makes the difference between "This is why you shouldn't have slippery floors" and "Deep-fat fryers are dangerous, although we're showing you something that only mentions them in possible relation to the grease stain on the floor."

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I still think there's more to be learned from the finer details, especially about keeping certain things separate to reduce the risk of injury. As an example, in looking into this I learned that water should never be boiled in a microwave. That stemmed directly from trying to understand the details, albeit as a complete tangent. This might be a difference of opinion, though.

I don't see her face going into the deep fryer either, but she fell sideways towards what could be a deep fryer. I think that was the accident they tried to portray based on the quick flash of injuries. I have difficulty picturing the kind of exposed burns they picture stemming from quick exposure to boiling water, but I can easily see it coming from boiling oil, and there is a flame burst so there's something flammable there. That said, we don't know if that really was water in that pot or something completely different. I'm not not an EMT or medical professional, my experience is based on injuries I sustained being splashed with a similar quantity of boiling water, so I may be completely mistakened.

[waterspyder.livejournal.com]

Boiling water will do that to your skin very quickly. It's more or less a 2nd degree burn with the blisters popped open. Steam and hot water injuries are some of the most overlooked, and thus the 2nd most common burn injury that is taught in first aid behind sunburn. Holding your arm over steam for less than 5 seconds can give you a second degree burn. That pot of water was ample to do the damage it did. And then even after the source of heat is gone, your tissues continue to burn because of the heat transferred to your skin, so her face is actually going to get worse.

The fire flareup looks like she hit a frying pan on the way down and upended oil onto a grill or something. That could have actually gone way worse, because if the grease lights on fire and water is added, then the flaming grease actually floats on the water and becomes really hard to contain.

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected. Thanks!

[torrain.livejournal.com]

She falls sideways and back. Here's a deep-fat fryer:



Her face didn't go into one of those on the way down, and she didn't get back up after she was lying on the floor. What she hit on the way down was a stove, not a fryer. I'm not seeing any reason to assume an accident caused by falling into a fryer. Heck, even the accident didn't look severe enough--you could still see bits of pink on her face under the blisters, and she had all her hair.

(You poured up to twenty-five gallons of boiling water, which may have been hotter than 100' Celsius (because a solute solution can actually exceed the boiling point of water) onto your face, and you call it a splash? I am stunned, and a little impressed.)

[sanityimpaired.livejournal.com]

Closer to 15 gallons across my arm, but yes. It was about as unpleasant as is to be expected. I expect the difference is the amount of surface area, my arm is a quarter to a third the width of my face and so there is a huge difference in the amount of heat transferred into tissue.