two-year-old girl who died in Spain on Wednesday<\/a> after being left in the car for hours by her father amid an extreme heatwave across the country.<\/p>\nAccording to local media reports, the father forgot to drop the child off at her creche and went straight to work without realising she was still inside the vehicle.<\/p>\n
Anyone who comes across a parked car in the summer with a child or animal inside should act quickly, police, health officials and road authorities warn.<\/p>\n
However guidance varies on when you should break the window yourself.<\/p>\n
In the UK, police say: “It is not advisable to force entry to the vehicle yourself straight away. Depending on the level of distress, your first step should be to call the police.”<\/p>\n
In the US, the road authority NHTSA says breaking into the car can be justified: “If the child is not responsive and appears to be in distress, attempt to get into the car to assist the child – even if that means breaking a window.”<\/p>\n
If the situation is not yet critical, passers-by could try to inform the store managers so that they can alert the owner of the vehicle, if it is parked in a commercial car park.<\/p>\n
Either way, calling the police or fire department is always a good idea, since they can open a car without breaking the window, which may injure those inside.<\/p>\n
If you need to break the window yourself, for example if a child looks unwell, Germany’s ADAC car club recommends both advising the police or fire department beforehand and taking a quick smartphone photo of the situation.<\/p>\n
Otherwise, a helpful passer-by runs the risk of getting into a dispute with the vehicle owner over damage to their property.<\/p>\n
Tests by ADAC show that a car left in the sun on a 28-degree day reached an internal temperature of 50 degrees after only 30 minutes. After an hour, the temperature can climb to 57 degrees, even with the windows slightly open.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It’ll be quick” can be deadly on a day that threatens to become hot. There’s no amount of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[9394,4949,10587,14346,1941,14344,14345,17,14343],"class_list":["post-28056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-animal","tag-car","tag-child","tag-hot","tag-how","tag-respond","tag-see","tag-spain","tag-you"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}