What Happened When Adults Sat in a Hot Car
The contest seems easy enough: Try to sit in a hot car for 10 minutes. But the impact of the Kars4Kids charity’s “Hot Kar Challenge” — offering $100 to any adult who could make it one sixth of an hour inside a closed vehicle parked in the sun — powerfully illustrates how difficult it is. More importantly, it closely mimics what occurs in 52 percent of heatstroke deaths when parents accidentally forget their children in the car.
(Photo: YouTube).
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“That was one of the worst things I’ve ever gone through in my life,” said one of the contestants, who participated in the challenge filmed on a hot day last month in New Jersey and posted on YouTube June 29. “It seems fine at first,” he continues, “but, like once that door closed, almost immediately it gets really hot and the airflow becomes almost oppressive.” The hot car “felt terrible,” added another contestant. A third admitted, “I felt like a pot of pasta.”
(Photo: YouTube).
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The conditions were so intense, not one of the participants was able to endure more than about even minutes. One by one, the footage shows the contestants fleeing the car and immediately drinking water — and in one instance, dousing himself with a glass.
(Photo: YouTube).
“We’re all well aware of fact that cars get hot quickly, but when you see it happening in front of you, it is kind of shocking,” Wendy Kirwan, director of public relations for Kars4Kids, tells Yahoo Parenting. “It can easily get over 120 degrees in the car and that’s fatal to a child.” Kirwan says that the charity created the video partly to draw attention to an app it created that enables a smart phone alarm to go off, reminding parents to take kids out of the car, after parking. “Even with the windows cracked,” Kirwan adds, “you can have a scary story happening if a child is left in a hot car.”
Indeed, what happens to a child left in a car baking in the sun is a nightmare, Pittsburgh-based family physician Deborah Gilboa, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Kids start to dehydrate and that makes their heart and respiratory rates increase as well as cause their blood pressure to rise,” she explains.
According to statistics on Kars4Kids’ website, the inside of a car can reach 109 degrees “within 15 minutes in the summer months.”
That figure is especially alarming given that “a child’s internal organs begin to shut down” when the temperature reaches 104 degrees, notes the charity. “Kids’ kidneys start to shut down,” explains Gilboa, who adds, “that puts a strain on the heart.”
The emotional impact of isolation in such heat takes an enormous toll as well. “It’s really important to note that developmentally, kids 4 and under don’t have a sense of time,” says Gilboa. “Even if you say, I’ll be back in 1 minute, most kids that age feel panicky left alone and start to feel like it’s been forever and that they’ve been abandoned. So even if they don’t suffer long-lasting physical effects, the psychological harm is more profound than it would seem to an adult.”
One participant in Kars4Kids’ contest spoke to this point after she bailed out of the challenge. “I could press the button,” she says in the video, referring to an alarm that the contest organizers put in the car which allowed participants to signal that they wanted to get out of the vehicle. “[Children in car seats] couldn’t press the button. They’d just be sitting there, desperate. I can only imagine how a child or baby would feel just siting and waiting there for someone to come and get them.”
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