DAYTON — The Miami Valley is in the middle of a heat wave this week.
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“It is so ridiculously hot and sticky that it’s hard to breathe out here in this weather,” Bobbie Jean said.
Once you leave your car after turning it off, it can heat up in a hurry sitting closed up in the sun.
“I left my car for ten minutes. I come back and it’s pretty brutally hot,” Trevon Burnside said.
On a 90-degree day after just 10 minutes, the inside of a car is 109 degrees.
And in 30 minutes the inside of a car can be 124 degrees.
It’s an environment that’s especially dangerous for children.
“Kids actually heat up three to five times faster than adults,” Abbey Pettiford of Dayton Children’s Hospital said.
Pettiford said it’s even more dangerous for infants since they can’t regulate their body temperature.
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Heat stroke can set in when your body temperature reaches 104.
Pettiford said the research in this area shows tragedies tend to have a common thread.
About a quarter of them happen when a child gets trapped in a car.
The other 75 percent happens when a caregiver is out of their routine.
“So let’s say I usually drive my daughter to childcare in the morning and one morning my husband has to do it. Well, that’s out of his routine. And so when you’re kind of on autopilot in the morning, you’re used to driving to work every single day. You may forget that drop-off,” Pettitford said.
There has been a push to put federal guidelines in place that would require all new cars to come with a backseat alert system, aimed at preventing hot-car deaths.
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