Why not leave a water bottle in the car?
Many of us have a good habit of always carrying a bottle of water with us. This habit turns out to be especially useful in hot summer. Even if direct sunlight does not hit a person's head, they can get heatstroke. For this reason, doctors recommend not only staying in the shade, but also drinking enough fluids.
In the heated interior of a car parked in the sun, the risk of getting heatstroke is even higher, so many drivers prudently take a bottle of water with them. However, this introduces unexpected risks. This is how employees of the fire department of the American city of Midwest City explain it.
Plastic containers and sun
If the bottle is plastic, prolonged exposure to the sun and high temperatures will result in a chemical reaction. During the reaction, some chemicals are released from the container into the water, which makes the water unsafe to drink.
But there is an even bigger threat, as American battery specialist Dioni Amuchastegi discovered. Sitting in the truck during his lunch break, out of the corner of his eye, he noticed smoke in the cabin. It turned out that his bottle of water refracted the sun's rays like a magnifying glass, and gradually heated part of the seat to such an extent that it began to smoke. Amuchastegi measured the temperature under the bottle. The result is almost 101 degrees Celsius.
Firefighter tests
Then, fire safety experts ran a series of experiments and confirmed that a water bottle can actually cause a fire, especially on hot days, when the inside of a closed car easily heats up to 75-80 degrees.
“Vinyl and other synthetic materials that are sheathed on car interiors usually begin to burn at a temperature of about 235 degrees Celsius,” –said CBS chief of service David Richardson.
"Under favorable conditions, a bottle of water can easily create this temperature, depending only on how refracted the sun's rays."Firefighters recommend never leaving clear liquid bottles where they can be exposed to the sun.
