The family of Andrew Sechrist from Seattle was looking forward to a fun summer day at the local splash pad, not assuming something horrible will happen.
As the four kids were running around and enjoying the water and the sun, the youngest one, 17-month-old Jackson, started screaming all of a sudden. Andrew rushed to check on him as he believed the boy tripped and fell, but that wasn’t the reason why the sweet toddler was in so much pain.
Andrew spoke to CafeMom about the incident because he wanted to warn parents to be extra cautious when visiting places like splash pads and said, “Everything was going well for about 15 minutes. I saw Jackson off to the side, about five feet from a water toy and I ran over, thinking he had fallen, to console him.”
“I picked him up and took him to a different section of the water area, but he was still inconsolable,” Andrew added.
Then, this worried father tried to dry Jackson off when he noticed his feet were literally melted. It was painful to watch, so imagine how the little boy must have felt with such severe burns.
“I could feel the heat coming off of them,” he said. “I looked down and noticed that the skin had basically melted on the bottoms of both of his feet.”
Andrew realized that Jackson walked over the metal electrical grate which Q13 Fox tested the following day and found the temperature it reached was 130 degrees. “Just putting my hand on here like that, I can’t keep it here for half a second, and my 1-1/2-year-old son walked across [it],” Andrew said.
It wasn’t surprising Jackson got second-degree burns. He was immediately rushed to the hospital and soon transferred to Harborview Medical Center to be treated by a specialist in their burns unit.
Thankfully, Jackson will get the treatment and will hopefully feel better shortly.
We hope no other child will ever get such bad injuries because of an innocent mistake of getting near a metal electrical grate. So, if you take your kids to a splash pad, make sure you keep a close eye on them at all times.