Indoor Summers
The Art
Indoor Summers
It was 91F degrees early one cloudy August day in Miami when weather experts came to measure just how hot playground equipment gets on a typical summer day. Even without the sun they found *:
“...
• Rubber surface: 107 in shade, 188 in sun
• Grass: 88 in shade, 104 in sun
• Slide: 111 in shade, 160 in sun
• Handrails: 104 in shade, 120 in sun
• Playground steering wheel: 104 in shade, 120 in sun
• Blacktop surfaces and asphalt get even hotter in the sun.
…The National Institute of Standards and Technology posted the following skin temperatures and the associated damage:
• 111 degrees: Kids feel pain
• 118 degrees: First-degree burn
• 131 degrees: Second-degree burn with blistering
• 140 degrees: Burned tissue becomes numb and susceptible to more burning
• 162 degrees: Skin tissue is instantly destroyed…”
If a cloudy day with 91F can get this hot, imagine the dangerous conditions in playgrounds in Phoenix AZ where, as of October, temperatures reached at least 110 degrees 70 times this year.
As extreme temperatures smash heat records across the world, dangerously hot summers are becoming the new normal. And with that, the days when kids can safely spend a summer afternoon outside playing baseball or soccer, or hanging out at playgrounds on slides, monkey bars and swings, will become fewer and fewer.
*Published August 23, 2023 8:44pm EDT, Fox Weather Hot playground danger: Kids could get third-degree burns from equipment
About the art – The digital painting is an abstraction of metal playground swings.
