It was 91 degrees Fahrenheit outside on Tuesday afternoon and Orem Police Department’s Lt. Craig Martinez decided to spend 20 minutes locked inside his car to teach a valuable lesson to parents.
Martinez took to Facebook live on the Orem Police Department’s Facebook page to document his experience, which showed the dangers of leaving children unattended in a vehicle during the summer.
“We’re doing this because every year we hear tragic cases of kids being left unattended in a vehicle,” Martinez said in the Facebook video. “The parents forget they are in there and inevitably we always have some kids who unfortunately pass away from being left in a car.”
In his experiment, Martinez had Orem paramedics measure his heart rate, blood pressure and temperature before he turned off the car’s air conditioning and again after he sat in the locked car for 20 minutes. The results had the inside temperature of the car rising from 98.1 degrees to 100.2 degrees. His heart rate rose from 82 to 127 and his blood pressure changed from 166/82 to 127/82.
“A child’s body temperature can raise about five times faster than an adult,” Martinez warned following the experiment.
If you see a child left in a vehicle and it’s 95 degrees outside or 80 degrees outside, you need to pick up the phone and you can even call 911. In our mind, that’s an emergency, especially with these higher temperatures that we’ve been having recently.” — Lt. Craig Martinez, Orem Police Department
Along with exposing himself to the hot confinement, Martinez also cooked a s’more in metal containers inside the car to demonstrate how extreme temperatures can be.
Martinez warned that Orem’s law requires children under the age of six to have another person over the age of 12 in the car with them at all times.
In 2016, Martinez said 39 kids nationwide passed away from heat stroke after being left unattended in a car. There have already by 23 deaths thus far this year by that same cause.
To help combat forgotten children in cars — which forgetfulness accounts for about 53 percent of those deaths — Martinez recommended calling 911.
“If you see a child left in a vehicle and it’s 95 degrees outside or 80 degrees outside, you need to pick up the phone and you can even call 911,” Martinez said. “In our mind, that’s an emergency, especially with these higher temperatures that we’ve been having recently.”
These rules also apply to leaving pets in a car, Martinez said. Watch the full experiment below.
Thank you, I appreciate you doing that.