[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...