Twice in 2010, Maine boys suffered severe burns after throwing gasoline on a campfire, one in Jefferson, the other in Madison. Both were airlifted to the Boston Shriner’s Hospital and, in the latter case, the boy died of his injuries.

“Simply standing back and throwing a cup of gasoline on a fire will cause a great fireball,” said Auburn Deputy Fire Chief Geoff Low. “It can follow that trail of gas right back up to you.”

It goes without saying that gasoline is an explosive substance–just weeks ago a Pittston man was injured when gas in a fuel filter he was changing sprayed onto a nearby hanging light. But, burns don’t require fire to be serious, or even deadly.

“We often get curious children who grab at something on the stove and pull a hot pan of soup or macaroni down on themselves,” said Jeff Chase, an emergency room nurse at Central Maine Medical Center.

According to the American Burn Association, a 140-degree liquid can cause a serious burn in less than five seconds. In 2003, the ABA reported, 83,300 children entered ERs with burns (21,000 for scalding), at a healthcare cost of $44 million. More than 65 percent of the cases, and 90 percent of the costs, were incurred by children aged 4 and under.

Most of what he sees, said Chase, involve sunburns.

“Unfortunately, there’s just not a lot we can do for that,” he said, “other than hydrate, and treat for pain, because, in a lot of cases, the patients are just miserable.”

Chase and Low agreed that the best thing for a first-degree burn–the kind that’s limited to redness and swelling–is to cool the skin under gently running water.

“If you don’t cool it, it’s going to continue to burn,” said Low. “It will radiate and cook the tissue, as awful as that sounds.

“The one thing I would say is don’t put any ointments on it,” he added. “There are still a lot of old wives’ tales out there about butter, or oils, and that kind of thing–don’t do any of that stuff. It can actually encapsulate the site, so it doesn’t allow any heat release and will actually help it to burn more. Also, anytime you apply moisture other than cooling water, you actually make a medium that helps infection to get through.”

The risk of infection is why people should do no more than cover second-degree burn–the kind in which blisters appear within minutes of the injury–or leave it open, if no sterile pad is available.

“We don’t want to break the blister if we don’t have to,” said Low, “because once you do that, you open up a port for infection.”

Infection is why, as recently as the mid-’70s, burn victims often died with as little as 20 percent of their bodies covered by second- and third-degree burns. The latter is defined as when the skin is charred and pain free because nerve endings have been burned away. The American Health Institute, which provided that statistic, reported that people can survive today even after being burned over 90 percent of their skin area. The biggest problem, it pointed out, is inhalation of hot gases, an issue, Low said, firefighters are sure to cover during their annual fire prevention pilgrimages to area schools.

“The biggest thing about ‘stop, drop and roll’ is remembering to cover the face,” he said. “That’s the pathway to life.”

“Because fire prevention does such a good job, we don’t see the burns we used to see years ago,” said LifeFlight paramedic Lori Metayer. When serious burns do occur, she said, even when they are not immediately life-threatening, it’s rarely the local ER where treatment occurs. A patient with second-degree burns over 30 percent of his or her body often will prompt a call for permission to fly direct to a specialized burn center in Portland or Boston.

“Hospitals are a plethora of diseases,” explained Metayer, who has flown patients with burns so severe electrodes had to be stapled to the chest, because there was no skin left on which to stick them. Burned flesh, she said, is something nobody wants to smell twice. “These are the people you really need to keep away from any kind of germ. That’s why they go to the burn centers, which exist in a kind of a bubble.”

It’s still worth going to the ER, Chase said, even for a first-degree burn, if it covers a major joint, if it wraps all the way around a limb, or if the victim is very young or old.

For more serious burns, the key is to call 9-1-1 right away, said, Metayer, so EMTs can arrive early enough to ensure an open airway, in case of swelling.

“The big thing to remember is that, if you have questions, or even if you’re not sure, go ahead and call us,” said Low. “We’d rather come out and say, we think you can see your doctor, than to not have us and have somebody suffer needlessly, or to have an issue we could have prevented and have long-term complications from it.”