Futaba Kitayama, a thirty-three-year-old woman serving on a firebreak demolition team, was buried under the remains of a home that she had been working to pull down. Extracting herself from the wreckage, she noted that she was bleeding. There were embers in her hair, and shards of glass had torn into her flesh. She found a towel and began wiping blood from her face. “To my horror, I found that the skin on my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The
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