Mother Warns Parents After Toddler Gets Sucked Into Spinning Dryer

A stock photo of a dryer (Rickharp at English Wikipedia / via reative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.)

A mother of three is claiming that her young daughter was sucked into a spinning tumble dryer. Now, she’s warning other parents.

The girl, Iiylah-Louise Johnstone-Evans, who is nearly two years old, was playing when she opened the dryer’s door and got her finger caught on a blanket as it spun round and round, mother Shannon Johnstone-Evans wrote on Facebook.

Shannon, 24, heard the girl’s screams and turned the dryer off as the girl’s head was pulled in the spinning apparatus at their Somercotes, UK, home on Oct. 18.

“I was in the kitchen cooking the kids dinner to hear iiylah screaming sic,” she wrote, adding that “it was quite muffled.”

The toddler was hospitalized due to the accident.

She received treatment for tissue damage to her fingers on her right hand at King’s Mill Hospital in Nottinghamshire, the SWNS news agency reported.

“I managed to get her out and unwrap the blankets,” she wrote on Facebook, adding that the “cotton was wrapped [around] her finger” and was “cutting the circulation.”

The girl’s fingers “twice there [sic] normal size,” Johnstone-Evans wrote.

Johnstone-Evans, who is the mother to three other children, said she attempted to contact the manufacturer of the Crusader CT31V tumble dryer. The company doesn’t exist anymore, SWNS reported.

“The dryer is a few years old but it had always stopped spinning when you opened the door,” she was quoted as saying.

“I’ve thrown the dryer out now and I’ll never have one again. Thank god she was able to cry out and warn me about what was happening,” the terrified mom explained. “It’s been horrible. It’s the most horrific thing that I have ever seen in my life.”

Johnstone-Evans said when the girl was being pulled, “it felt like everything was just taking ages.”

The experience proved to be traumatic for the girl, who is 23 months old.

“The next day, we put her to bed as normal, but at around 7 p.m. she started screaming again,” Johnstone-Evans said. “She was shaking all over and started vomiting repeatedly. The doctors reckon it must be some sort of seizure, perhaps brought on by shock. Thankfully she is all ok now and on the mend.”

At the end of her Facebook post, the mother offered a warning to others, saying: “I want to mainly warn parents how dangerous tumble dryers are.”

Dryer Fires

A more common hazard posed by the household appliance, however, are fires.

“Every year, firefighters across the country respond to around 14,630 home fires caused by clothes dryers, according to the National Fire Protection Association,” says Consumer Reports.

A third of these fires was caused by too much lint. That means if you don’t clean out your dryer vent, you can set up a dangerous situation.

“Some dryers have indicators designed to alert you when lint has built up and blocked the vent.”

“Our clothes dryer tests have found that LG’s FlowSense and Samsung’s Vent Sensor detect completely blocked vents but aren’t as good at detecting partially blocked vents,” according to Consumer Reports.