NC nursing home resident badly burned while smoking cigarette with oxygen machine
A North Carolina nursing home resident who uses an oxygen machine suffered severe burns and nearly prompted an evacuation on Saturday after lighting up a cigarette, fire officials said.
Burlington firefighters responding to a 3 a.m. report of a possible building fire instead found smoke in a room and hallway, according to a Burlington Fire Department news release.
Fire and EMS workers immediately tended to the patient. Police arrived and helped move everyone else to shelter-in-place locations away from smoke.
“Medical oxygen being delivered at 100% rapidly accelerates combustion and can ignite if in the presence of flames, such as that of a cigarette,” fire officials warned in the news release.
Staff at the facility on Hilton Road pulled the fire alarm when they saw smoke and began evacuation procedures per the facility’s emergency plan, fire officials said.
Fire officials aren’t naming the facility.
The burn patient was a taken to a regional hospital and later to the UNC Hospitals Burn Unit in Chapel Hill, where the person was in stable condition, according to the fire department.
This story was originally published January 7, 2023 at 5:48 PM with the headline "NC nursing home resident badly burned while smoking cigarette with oxygen machine."