A 19-year-old woman says she has finally come to terms with her scars nearly three years after she was burned by molten plastic on Valentine’s Day. Hannah Armstrong was left with significant burns to her leg after her clothes caught fire.
It was believed that a fire was started by a group of teenagers to keep warm, but Hannah’s clothes were set alight when she was accidentally splashed with melted plastic on February 14, 2020. At first she didn’t realise she was on fire, then when she saw the flames she suddenly stopped, dropped and rolled while screaming at her friends to call for help.
Her mum, Rachel Birchall, 40, rushed Hannah, who was 16 at the time, to University Hospital of North Durham, County Durham. She was then blue-lighted to Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle Upon Tyne where there was a burns unit. Hannah had the melted plastic, clothes, dead tissue and skin scraped off her, which she described as “sounding disgusting”.
