A fun afternoon at the park turned into a hard-learned lesson for a family visiting Prince George.
Prince Rupert residents Pamela Vera and her three young sons spent a two-week vacation in the city visiting family and friends. On Aug. 2, an outing to the Duchess Park playground was cut short when Vera had to rush her youngest to the hospital.
Vera had helped Ammon, who is nearly two years old, join his brothers at the top of the slide before returning to her seat to watch him play.
"He was about halfway down the slide and then he just started to scream," Vera recalled. "And he was going, 'Hot, hot.'"
Vera said Ammon was going down the slide feet first, on his stomach. In the seconds it took for her to jump up and grab him from the play structure he had two raw knees and within minutes of bringing him back to her seat, two blistering hands.
"I think he might have skinned his knees and then kind of propped himself up and burnt his hands that way. I really don't know, it all happened so fast," she said.
Leaving her two older sons, ages five and seven, in the care of a friend who had accompanied them to the park, Vera took Ammon to the University Hospital of Northern B.C., where he was treated for second-degree burns.
For the duration of their stay in the city, Vera brought Ammon to the hospital's burn unit every day for new bandages and his injury scuttled any other summer plans.
While Vera said she understands that there isn't always a lot of shaded areas over playgrounds for safety reasons, some sort of cautionary signage regarding the heat of the equipment might be useful.
"It's something that I never, ever anticipated," she said, adding that when she shares the story people are surprised that a metal slide wasn't the culprit and that the synthetic material could get so hot.
The other kids were going down the slide sitting down, said Vera. "My older son said, 'Mom, it was hot. I started to go down and then I ran down the rest because it was too hot to sit on,'" she said. But two-year-old Ammon couldn't make the same connection.
Burns appear to make up a relatively small fraction of overall playground injuries. Most readily available literature on playground safety by national organizations such as the Canadian Paediatric Society and Safe Kids Canada focuses on the dangers of falls (responsible for 75 per cent of injuries) or strangulation hazards.
Vera said she questioned, in hindsight, her own decision to bring her children to the park on a day where the temperature peaked at almost 29 C, but she dismissed the notion.
"There were other people there, there was daycare there," she said. "I'm not the only one that takes my kids to the park on a nice day, right?"
Vera said she didn't report the incident to the city, which owns the accessible park that opened last year, but wanted to spread the word about its potential.
"If I can prevent it happening to other kids, that's all I can do," she said.
City operations superintendent Bill Gaal confirmed the city didn't receive a report of the incident, nor was he aware of similar mishaps in the past at other city-owned playgrounds.
"Now that we're aware of this, we will investigate," he said.
Gaal also said that all city playground equipment meets or exceeds the Canadian Standards Association guidelines for safety.
One of the things playground safety inspectors check for is whether slides are in the shade or facing away from the sun during peak hours.
