Burn victims in Georgia face long recovery

30-minute visits for family
In the waiting rooms, the wives, parents, brothers and sisters of the refinery victims spend their days swapping stories and updates on their loved ones in the long stretches between visiting hours — or visiting half-hours, mostly. Most of the visitors are 140 miles from home.

Every morning, noon and afternoon, they gather outside the ICU for 30-minute visits. They get one full hour every evening. They stand at the patient's bedside offering words of encouragement and prayers and looking for any sign of response.

Jenny Purnell got more than she expected from her husband, 23-year-old Justin Purnell, when he looked up at her and moved his mouth this week. With a breathing tube in his throat, he couldn't speak, but she managed to read his lips.

"He opened his eyes and said, 'Good morning,' and then he said, 'I love you,'" Jenny says. "Just the littlest things through all this make you feel so much better."

She last heard her husband's voice the night of Feb. 7, when he called her on his cell phone from inside the refinery. Something had blown up, he told her, and she needed to call 911. He phoned back a few minutes later to tell her he had made it outside OK before the phone went dead.

Families try to cope
The families have received an outpouring of donations. They are getting ready to move from hotels into apartments — another reminder of the long recovery ahead — paid for by Imperial Sugar. Church groups deliver hot meals such as fried chicken and lasagna twice a day. The burn center's foundation gives them $50 gas cards for trips home.

Hattie Frazier's son, refinery floor manager Malcolm Frazier, worked in the packing department that took the brunt of the Feb. 7 explosion. A co-worker, his mother says, found him on the floor of the burning building and dragged him to safety. He suffered second- and third-degree burns on 85 percent of his body.

Malcolm had planned to take a week off this month to take a trip with his parents to celebrate their 57th wedding anniversary March 14. Now they will be spending it at the burn center, where visiting four times a day is too much for Malcolm's mother.

"I go in once a day and pray for him, but it's real hard," she says. "To see him open his eyes, but he can't say anything, it's too much to go through. But I let him know I'll be here as long as he's here."

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