The dangers of a moving vehicle are no mystery, but less well known are the hazards of one that’s parked.

Vehicles can act as potent greenhouses, trapping the sun’s heat and causing temperatures inside to soar.

“Energy enters through a car’s window and heats up objects inside of the vehicle,” explained Jan Null, a meteorologist at San Francisco State University, who has done extensive research on vehicular hyperthermia. “When the sun strikes objects in the car, the objects become hot and rapidly warm the air inside the car.”

Infants and children are especially susceptible to heat. A child’s body warms three to five times faster than an adult’s, so their temperature rises quicker, according to Null. This places children at greater risk of hyperthermia, a condition that occurs when the body’s systems become overwhelmed by heat and stop functioning.

With each passing minute, a car’s temperature rises. Cracking a window is largely ineffective in slowing the heating process and after about an hour, a car’s temperature plateaus at roughly 45 to 50 degrees more than the outside air temperature, Null said.

By the time a child’s temperature reaches 106 degrees, his or her heart is likely beating 50 to 60 times more per minute than usual, said Dr. Timothy Beatty, an emergency medicine specialist at Summerville Medical Center.

At this point, their heating and cooling systems, which are regulated via perspiration, begin to shut down, and they can lose consciousness or become delirious, Beatty said.

“If your heart beats that much faster, your respiratory rate needs to go up to compensate,” Beatty explained. “You can’t go on a treadmill and have your heart rate go up 50 beats and not be breathing faster. You will start sweating rapidly and because you’re losing water, you will become dehydrated.”

Between 1998 and 2007, at least 414 children died from being left in a vehicle, according to Null, who believes the number is actually closer to 500. “We know we are undercounting and it may be as much as by 20 percent,” he said.

Null examined media reports from hundreds of child vehicular hyperthermia deaths from 1998 through 2007 and found that in about half the cases, the child was “forgotten” by the caregiver. In the majority of the remaining cases, the unattended child was playing in the vehicle.

“If a child doesn’t die from being left in a vehicle, he or she may still have serious damage to their organs,” Null said. “I’ve studied cases in which children have become totally incapacitated and will have to be fed for the rest of their lives.”

Summerville Police Capt. Jon Rogers is unsure how many calls the department receives each year regarding unsupervised children in vehicles, but noted that it does happen and “it is a very real problem.”

When a call is received concerning an unattended child in a car, multiple officers are dispatched to the scene.

“Fortunately, we’ve never had a situation in which a child was in severe distress,” Rogers said. “If that happened, we wouldn’t hesitate to break the car’s window.”

Only 15 states have laws that prohibit leaving a child unattended in a vehicle and although South Carolina isn’t one of them, Rogers advises people to never leave a child unsupervised in a car.

“Just because we don’t have a law saying you can’t do it doesn’t mean you can,” Rogers said.

Null, who echoes Rogers’ sentiments, says parents and caregivers often underestimate how long an errand will take.

“When we go into the bank or grocery store for what we think will be five minutes, it often ends up turning into half an hour,” Null said.

When people learn a child has died from being left in a vehicle, they often incorrectly assume it’s an isolated incident, according to Null.

“It’s an epidemic,” he said. “But there’s no real awareness of the issue.”

Contact Michael Tannebaum at 873-9424 ext. 215 or mtannebaum@journalscene.com

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