WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES
A mum-of-three suffered serious burns after her Casera pressure cooker with boiling soup exploded over her arms, chest and stomach.
Cassie Hodges, from Goulburn, had just put her newborn baby down to serve dinner minutes before the explosion.
She received burns to 12 per cent of her body, and her husband Mark now has to help her with everyday tasks because of the unbearable pain.
Mark had put some soup in the pressure cooker on Friday night, and Cassie called out to her older girls, Olivia, five, and Ruby, two, to come to the kitchen table.
“I walked back into the kitchen and Mark let the pressure release valve off to release the pressure. The steam came out of the top as normal. Then I heard a click, suddenly I knew the lid unlocked and the next minute I was hit with something,” she told Kidspot.
Shockingly, the lid had unlocked and with the pressure building, it flew off, showering Cassie and Mark in boiling liquid.
“The entire contents hit me like as if someone chucked a bucket of water at me, the noise of it was a loud sizzle,” she said.
“I immediately screamed. My partner was holding his stomach and he pulled his arm back and his skin was all peeled off. I removed my singlet and ran to the shower.
She believes her daughter Olivia will require counselling after seeing the accident unfold.
An ambulance and fire truck arrived to take Cassie and Mark to hospital.
She said: “I was lucky, if I hadn’t gotten straight into the shower I would have needed skin grafts and doctors said if I had breathed any of it in I would have been put into a coma to save my life.
“I was told I had to have all my dead burnt skin removed by scraping with a rough towel and biobrane, a type of pig skin, applied immediately.”
Mark suffered a deep burn on his stomach.
Cassie is positive the couple will make a full recovery and is grateful her son wasn’t hurt.
“It terrifies me, I’ve cried many times thinking about my son, thinking it could have been him,” she said.
Cassie is using this as a warning to other people who own the Casera pressure cooker (which she received as a Christmas present in 2014), urging them to throw it out or demand a refund.
“I want people to be aware of the dangers, we did nothing wrong, the machine unlocked prematurely, it should stay locked and unable to be opened until the pressure is all gone,” she said.
Cassie yesterday met with a lawyer and has so far been unsuccessful in contacting the manufacturer.
