RV FEATURE
To drive the point home , and to hopefully save someone from a nasty burn , I lit two fires in separate fireplaces . Then , I extinguished one fire with about 7.5L of water , while the other was smothered with shovels of dirt . I then used a typical meat thermometer to take the temperature of each fireplace , and the difference was astonishing .
Hands up if you ’ re guilty of ever ‘ extinguishing ’ your campfire with sand or soil before heading off to bed or perhaps to the next destination ? You wouldn ’ t be the only one . In fact , there have been numerous reported cases of people and animals being severely burned after stepping in a fireplace that had been smothered with soil , believing it to be cold .
In 2020 , a nine-year-old boy was severely burned by a campfire north of Gympie , Qld , when he jumped into what we thought was a pile of sand . It was , however , smouldering ash and he suffered full-thickness burns to 12 per cent of his body .
The reality is , coals retain a great deal of heat long after the fire has reduced to embers , and a layer of dirt or sand is simply not enough to make a campfire safe .
THE RESULTS
First-degree burns can occur around 48 ° Celsius , while seconddegree burns can occur around 55 ° C . Third-degree burns , however , will occur around 60- 65 ° C . Naturally , the severity of each burn will also depend on the length of exposure to the source of the heat . But the point remains : a fire that has been smothered in dirt , rather than extinguished properly with water , will retain enough heat to severely burn skin for hours .
Each fire was built to about the same size as the other , and each fairly represented the sort of fire a person might have going on a lazy afternoon with friends . With each fire having developed a decent amount of coals , I let them burn down . One fire then received six or seven shovel-loads of dirt , while the other was doused in water .
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