The Accident and Initial Injury Report

What we know about the accident is sketchy.

The accident occurred just before 3:00pm on Sunday, October 14th. Jeff was with his girlfriend and his best friend. Jeff was working on a car and somehow, chemicals he was working either with or near spontaneously combusted. He was able to get the fire off of his body and he was taken by ambulance to the burn center. Fortunately, no one else was harmed.

We were initially told that he had second and third degree burns on his forearms, legs, a patch on his back, a patch on his face and a tiny spot on his foot. Additionally, we were told that the entire epidermal layer on the backs of both of his hands had burned completely off, in addition to some portions of the dermal layer.

They were also concerned about lung damage but will not be able to gauge the severity for a few days. Until they know, he is intubated and under heavy sedation, thereby unconscious for most of the day and night.

The biggest initial complication was not knowing what chemical(s) that could have burned Jeff or been inhaled by him. The chemical continued to burn him for several hours as they attempted to neutralize it. About 9:00 last night they told us that they felt they'd finally neutralized most or all of it, stopping the spread of the burn.

Here is a news article about it with a video (on the right side of the screen). The 15% number is never something that's been told to any of us so I'm not sure how accurate it is. The fire was not started by running over a lighter as one news story erroneously reported. The witness cited in that story was not a witness at all.

I'll update as we know more. As I'm writing this post I actually do know more but I wanted this post to contain only what we initially know so that people who want to read from the beginning, can.