Toddler Suffers Life-Changing Burns Due to Unsafe Water Temperatures | The Levin Firm

A case that I handled that always stuck with me was the case of a little girl who was burned very badly in a bathtub. It happened in an apartment building here in Philadelphia. She was home with her half-sister, and her mother's boyfriend was babysitting at the time. The half-sister, who was 12 years old at the time, was giving my client a bath. Who at the time of this incident was around 18 months old, just an infant.

The boyfriend was in the kitchen making dinner, and at some point, the 12-year-old yells out to her father and says, "Dad, I want to go to the corner store. I want to go get some candy." He's in the kitchen, and the TV's on, and there's a lot of background noise, and he yells back to her, "No, you're bathing your sister," something along those lines, but for some reason, she heard approval. This child was left alone in the bathtub, and she kind of had her hands on the side of the tub, and she was playing around and splashing. And she made her way over to the faucet. She got her hands on the hot water, and she turned it on.

The temperature of that water began to increase. And it became uncomfortable for this little baby, and she began to cry. But the boyfriend who was in the kitchen is still under the assumption that there's a 12-year-old in there bathing her. The child's screams become more and more aggressive. The boyfriend goes into the bathroom, and he sees that her legs, from about the middle of her thigh down all the way to her toes and the bottom of her feet suffered third-degree burns.

She spent the next 42 days in the intensive care unit. She almost died multiple times from shock. They shaved her head and grafted off her scalp to use on her legs because so much of the skin was damaged beyond repair and had to be replaced. The legs formed a shell of scar tissue. As her, you know, tiny legs began to grow into adolescence and then one day into adult legs, the skin would get tighter and tighter.

And as a result, what would be necessary is repeated skin expansion surgeries and scar revision surgeries, probably for the remainder of her life. So who's responsible for this terrible harm, this, this absolute tragedy? The first thing that I did was I hired an engineer, and he went out to the scene and he started performing tests. He had a digital thermometer that he placed into the stream of water. He measured it at 135 degrees.

Code in Philadelphia does not allow for water temperature to exceed 120 degrees. And there's a good reason for that. At 120 degrees, it will take approximately 4.5 minutes for skin to suffer a third-degree burn. But at 135 degrees, the temperature in this bathtub, it takes less than 10 seconds. When he gave me that data, I knew that we had a case and that we had to fight for this little girl, and we had to figure out why it was that this building was allowing such dangerously hot water into their apartments where their tenants reside, where their children reside.

We took all of the data that this expert gave us and we wrote a complaint, and it articulated over 100 acts and violations of negligence on the part of the property owner and also on the part of the property manager. And then we did something called a site inspection. We went in and we did all of our measurements and we tested the water, and the water was still exactly 135 degrees.

Even after I gave them a complaint that articulated with extraordinary specificity all of the problems that they had with their plumbing, with their water, not a single thing had been changed. The property owner, the property manager didn't care. One of the first things that the defendant did when we sued them is they joined their HVAC contractor who's responsible for the hot water heater. They turned over all of their service documents, and at the bottom there's a notes section, and he writes out in that instruction, "Guys, you've turned the temperature up to 170 degrees," and actually writes the words, "You're going to burn your tenants." This litigation took years and years because of COVID And so I got to watch a baby really grow into a little girl. I grew to really love her.

I felt like she was part of my family. Ultimately, we were able to resolve this case for a very large number.

The building denied liability the entire time and fought with us the entire time and pointed the finger at everyone but themselves. Ultimately, we held them to account and we got this little girl an amazing recovery and changed the trajectory of her life.