[DanBC]

McDonalds had been warned about servig their coffee so hot; they had previously settled suits from hot coffee; they were serving coffee hotter than their rivals.

Try making a coffee today and taking the temperature of that coffee ten minutes after making it. I doubt it'd be hot enough to cause full thickness burns.

[emn13]

Where'd you get the 10 minute number from?

Also, if you put a lid on coffee (which you'd do when you want it to stay warm as when it's not necessarily for immediate consumption), it can stay hot quite a while.

Personally, I don't believe most people would have gotten third degree burns in a similar situation. Unfortunately, she was old (79), light (therefore likely frail; 47kg), and wore cotton (absorbent) sweatpants, and she must have kept them on for at least 12 seconds according to the evidence her own lawyers presented. Frankly, that's just a bunch of bad luck piled up. Most people would have stood up when the coffee spilled toward them, not sat in it for that long, and most people would have taken off at least partially the hot pants, thereby distributing the heat better, some people probably would have their pants off entirely by that point. (Wikipedia claims scalding rarely results in third-degree burns, let alone third degree burns on 6% of your body's surface area with a lot more second degree burn area).

Even at boiling point you need a number of circumstances to get this kind of injury. It takes quite a while, and needs to affect a large surface area, and needs to somehow be retained near the skin. That's just not all that likely to happen; and when it does, being old and light make recovery slower and less likely. She simply had the worst circumstances on all fronts.

[DanBC]

10 minutes is a pure guess at the time it takes to serve the coffee, pay for it, walk out of the restaurant, get in a car, be driven as a passenger, pull up some place and adjust the coffee.

> Even at boiling point you need a number of circumstances to get this kind of injury. It takes quite a while, and needs to affect a large surface area, and needs to somehow be retained near the skin.

2% of non-fatal household scald injuries in > 65 year olds needed tranfer to specialist hospitals for specialist treatment. If that's what you mean by rare then I guess we agree, but it's not what I'd call rare.

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5836a1.htm?mobile... (apologies for mobile link)

The CDC used to have tables for the length of time it took to achieve partial thickness or full thickness burns at various water temperatures.

At just 60 C it takes only five seconds to get a serious scald. At the temperature of 80 C burns are almost instant and probably require surgery.

Here's a nice chart with plenty of sourcing so we can check it for accuracy.

http://www.accuratebuilding.com/services/legal/charts/hot_wa...