Lessons Learned- The Canning Incident

When everyday events become learning events:

This weekend a friend asked for help canning. My friend Jane had me and another lady Mary, help her put up 20 pounds of beets. Three ladies canning….. what could go wrong?

Jane, Mary and I started working in stations. Sometimes we would switch things up but we were working fast, no one watching the other closely. Because she lacked big pots, Jane decided to use her pressure cooker pot to boil the beets. The pressure cooker pot was huge and was slow to boil so Jane decided to use the lid. Jane put the lid on without sealing it. I checked the beets once and just set the lid on top. Mary checked the beets, put the lid on and latched it.

About 20 minutes later, Mary went to check the beets again. She started to remove the lid and it exploded. The top flew, boiling water and beet slush everywhere. I heard the sound; I heard the screaming. I could feel the burning spots on my right side. Mary took the full force of the boiling water. We got her soaked shirt off of her and she went straight to the bathroom. Even running cold water on her bare skinned areas, the blisters formed in the matter of minutes. Our clothing protected us but the exposed skin areas were bad.

Long story short, Mary took the full force of the boiling water on her hands, neck and chest. With over an hour of her spraying cold water on the areas, she was shaking from the cold. She kept talking about her Grandpa telling her to be tough, refusing to go to urgent care. When her whole body was shaking violently and she was not doing well, she finally went to the ER.

Lessons learned:

You know your equipment. Make sure you teach people how to use it or do it yourself. The owner of the pressure cooker knew her equipment and just assumed…..

Severe burns to the neck can cause swelling which can affect breathing.

Prolonged exposure to cold can cause hypothermia.

 

I can relate - kitchen burns are the scariest...

I stupidly dropped a hot cuppa green tea and burned both legs, ankle and part of a foot.

The upside, when I did got to hospital, the Doc wrote me a script for *6* tubes of Sivadene.

I had been using Silver gel -[ https://www.walmart.com/ip/Curad-Ge...MIhIbInrae7AIVB7zACh0dvQzoEAQYAiABEgJkIvD_BwE] One of the few OTC Silver-based gels I could find here in Anchorage.

The doc was OK with that course of treatment, but worried over the blisters. So we talked - and once he understood my training, was happy to write a script for the Silvadene. (Silver sulfadiazine)

Traded out dressings daily etc. No scars, but the skin tuns a bright red in the hot tub still, two years on.

It only takes a second/minor slip/blink of an eye..... I no longer carry hot drinks down the stairs....

 

WOW hope everything turned out OK. Burns are painful and seem to take forever to heal. If they're severe enough they can get infected. Many years ago I received a burn on the side of my head and face from a malfunctioning propane device. Had sheets of skin hanging off.

Went to the local burn unit and they gave me percocet, allowed it to take effect and proceeded to scrub the affected area with a stiff bristled brush and antibiotic soap. That was repeated daily and in a few days, all new skin grew out and it was completely healed in less than a week.

 

Another bad one lots of folks don't realize, bathroom accidents can kill you! I have slipped twice and fallen, the first time cracked 4 ribs, and the second required 25 stitches to my butt cheek, now I pull to the right!

My Grand Mother blew up a pressure cooker once, the wobbler some how got stuck and it blew out the kitchen windows when it blew, lucky no one was in the room, pretty supprizing what a gallon of water under steam pressure can do!

 

Next time instead of water , use eggs !!!,,towel down on chair to catch the egg drops , top off bra on and crack eggs in a glass use the whites and lay it on thick on all hot spots , do this a few times till she feels no more pain .. to the point of opening up a cup of the bra and pour egg whites in so she can do her front .
I hope no skin graphs were needed .

egg whites are collagen to feed the skin !!

Sloth

 

Wow. That was one scary post.

I'm sorry anyone got hurt, and I'm glad (and a little surprised) that no one got hurt worse.

I know about steam. I've designed steam stuff and worked with the steam equations.

That accident could easily have been fatal, and/or left everyone involved with debilitating scars.

The cold water treatment may be suitable when there is no doctor available, and no pain meds. But for it to work right you have to use passive immersion.

The mechanical force of a water spray probably tore the blisters to shreds and hyperstimulated every screaming nerve in the burned areas.

For immersion, the water should be cold enough to shut down the burning pain, but not cold enough to crash the core temperature. And (for a bad 2nd degree sunburn, at least) it takes about eight hours of constant immersion to stop the pain and minimize the damage.

That's my personal experience talking, there. I've been there, done that, and I didn't have a t-shirt at the time.

Once you're burned, the burn worsens over the next 12 hours or so, unless you short circuit the process by pervasive cold.

Now here is a question that begs asking: how could the pressure cooker build up a large head of steam without screaming through the vent? Or did someone also put the weight on over the vent tube?

Most pressure cookers are designed so that it's physically impossible to casually open them under pressure. There is far too much friction involved, and probably a mechanical interlock as well in the threads.

If the vent was steaming up a storm, that should have been a warning as clear as a rattlesnake's rattle. Certainly to an adult, anyway.

Even with an open vent, the pressure buildup can be substantial. The steam just can't get out fast enough if there is a big enough fire under the pot.

If the lid was just barely latched, it might have been steaming all the way around the lid, and out the vent, and still had enough pressure built up to go boom.

And that might have looked at first glance like an ordinary pot that was just starting to boil over...

There is something about steam boilers that not everyone knows. There are two ways they can explode.

One way is to load it up with water and heat it past the pressure limit of the safety valve. A defective (or weighted/tied down) safety valve is what turns the excess pressure into a disaster.

The other way is to run the boiler in the normal fashion, but let it run dry. Then a safety valve is essentially useless.

At some point the last of the water will flash into steam like a bundle of dynamite going off. It happens in a split instant, and no safety valve I know of can work fast enough (or vent enough pressure) to save the boiler.

The pressure literally goes hyperbolic, just like a nuclear reaction.

Just a few years ago a man showing a steam tractor at a farm show in Ohio was killed when the boiler ran dry.

You don't get much warning with a flash explosion.

Steam is incredibly powerful.

 

Good post about the egg whites. Thanks, Cruisin Sloth. I'll keep that one in mind.

Yard Dart has it right. There is no place you are more likely to die than in your own home--and the bathroom is probably the deadliest room in the house.

I had a doctor try to do the sneak test for paranoia on me once. He asked me if I felt safe in my own home.

I looked at him like he was an idiot and asked him if he knew how many people died every year in their own homes. I told him a person would have to be crazy to think their home was a safe place.

He put away his little cheat sheet and dropped the subject.

BTW: Never use your own bathroom. It's too dangerous. Use the neighbor's bathroom instead, and have him use yours. Statistics show that the number of people that die in a neighbor's bathroom each year is essentially zero. Much safer, yes?

 

Funny responded to a lot of dead people in the bathroom, they go there because they dont feel well and drop

 

never ever remove lid on a pressure cooker until it has stopped venting and released pressure in canner

 

I have no clue why it was not whistling. This was an old huge pressure cooker that you could have cooked a 20 pound turkey in. It was big and old but maybe the pressure hand not built up enough to start whistling but when she opened it was a boom and lid flying with water and crud. I know she was wrestling with it earlier but I was not paying attention. I was at a different station, making beet slices. Truthfully because it was beets it looked like a chainsaw massacre had happened.

 

Wow so sorry she was injured. I have two inherited pressure cookers that are over 90 years old. I have the both tested at the cooperative extension yearly. FYI. They are both All American Brand canners. I had to have the pressure release valve replaced on one last year and the dealer told me he would give me over $1000 for that canner. Apparently as a collector's item its worth alot more than as a canner

 

Out at the Grand Folks old home ( Now belonging to my Cousin and I) they built a 2 car garage onto the back of the house, conveniently attached to the kitchen/pantry, though they never parked a single car, bike, sled, or anything in there, it was purpose built for canning! There used to be two great big wood fired stoves for heating and boiling/pressure cooking, since replaced with them fancy 'letric stoves built into the counters, but they still do the job! I remember as a kid, all the Aunts and Cousins spending the fall months in there canning all sorts of stuff, jams, jellys, pears, apples, beets, berries, and meats of all kinds, and Cherries, great big almost black, extraordinary flavor Cherries and juice. Seems so long ago, but it was hoppin in there, even with both the big doors open and a big fan runnin, it was awesome for a little feller like me! Mint season was my favorite, that harvest ( there were two per season) was the most fun time, and when we were canning mint, the whole valley smelled of fresh mint! We have 12 super 'spensive pressure cookers just for the mint, as well as 4 of the special steam trucks to harvest it. those have to be tested before each use, and then cleaned after, ironically, with steam! These pressure cookers have special safety interlocks, basically, you cannot open one with any pressure on it, and you cannot vent it unless there is an emergency, which takes a two handed multi step process to do! Same with the Trucks, once they have about 20 pounds of steam on them, you have to wait till they vent before you can drain them! You can open the hopper and scope out the mash, which then gets sold off to the Tea companies after it's pressed and dried, it gets packed in special paper sacks and put up in a special storage area! We all still gather together for canning season, as well as processing whatever meat/game gets brought in, but it's just not the same as it was when Gee-mamma was still with us, all the aunts and cousins in there fussing about, and the gossip would flow, as well as the smoking and drinking, which was kinda funny looking back! I surely do miss those days!