What To Do If You Accidentally Lock Your Child Or Baby In A Car

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In an average year, over 1,000 children are rescued from locked cars in Australia, and tragically, a few children who are not rescued die after being locked in a car. If you accidentally lock your young child in your car, it is important to react calmly and quickly. Here is what you need to do:

1. Assess the temperature and the potential risk to the child

Being locked in a car in hot weather is substantially more dangerous than being locked in a car in cool weather. On a hot day, the interior of a car can reach 40 degrees Celsius in just seven minutes. On a very hot day (32-degrees Celsius), the car's interior may heat up to 75 degrees.

At these temperatures, the child is susceptible to heat stroke, illness or suffocation, and you need to remove your child from the car as quickly as possible. If the temperature is slightly cool, you don't need to panic. You can try a few different ways to open the car before you result to breaking a window.

While you experiment with strategies to get the car open, keep an eye on the child to make sure he or she is okay.

2. Contact an emergency automotive locksmith

If you want your car unlocked with no damage to the car, contact an emergency automotive locksmith immediately. Depending on your location, these professionals may be able to reach you in an hour or less, and skilled locksmiths can open vehicle locks in ten minutes or less. Tell the locksmith the nature of the situation so he or she can prioritise your call.

3. Contact your emergency assistance service

If you have a built-in roadside assistance and remote services program in your car, you may be able to contact the people associated with this service and ask them unlock your car. Some of these services connect to apps that can help you find your car or unlock it when it is locked.

If your car is outfitted with the devices that connect to these types of services but you don't have a subscription, you may want to call and see if the service can help you. Even if you don't have a subscription, they may be willing to unlock your car remotely due to the situation.

4. Try to unlock the car using items you have on hand

If it is not that hot out, you can try to unlock the car yourself using basic household objects such as a door stopper (wedge) and a metal rod. Take the wedge and push it between the top of the car door and the window. When you have a small opening, push the metal rod through it, and hit the unlock button with the metal rod.

If you don't have those particular items lying around, you can use a small knife, a credit card or any other thin object to pry open the window. In lieu of a metal rod, use a wire hanger or even a stick.

5. Break the window

If it is 32-degrees or hotter, you should skip to this step immediately. Break the window furthest from the trapped child. For example, if he or she is in a car seat behind the driver's seat, break the passenger window.  

Breaking a car window isn't as easy as it looks. Because the glass is tempered, it has enough surface tension to resist the blunt force of a blow with a mallet. If the window's glass doesn't break when you try to hit it with something large, use something small and pointy such as a broken shard of porcelain from an old spark plug.

17 March 2015