LONG BRANCH — Anne Pekarofski can’t imagine forgetting to take her 3-year-old daughter Zoey out of the car on a hot summer day, but she knows it happens to some parents.

So when experts offered tips today on how to prevent that type of tragedy from occurring, Pekarofski said she’s more than willing to adopt some new practices into her routine.

“You always think, ‘how can a parent forget a child?’ But it’s heartbreaking to see how easily it can happen because your mind is all over the place,” said the Hazlet mother.

It’s an awareness that Safe Kids New Jersey and Monmouth Medical Center are trying to raise during a season when cars can quickly turn into a stifling death trap for those too young to get themselves out.

At a luncheon in Long Branch, city police officers also gave mothers a demonstration of how they respond to calls of children locked in cars.

Officer Thomas Hueston said the department hasn’t had any fatal incidents, but had two cases this month where children were accidentally locked in cars.

To emphasize how quickly the temperature inside cars can climb on a hot day, they hooked up a thermometer to a black SUV at the start of the lunch. In a half hour, when the outside air temperature was 77 degrees with low humidity and an oceanfront breeze, the temperature inside the vehicle shot to 140 degrees.

“If you look at some of the facts, they are very shocking,” said Dr. Renuka Verma, director of the pediatric residency program at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch. “A car that is parked in a sunny spot can have a temperature rise up to 20 degrees within 10 minutes.”

That means the temperature inside an average car can climb to 125 degrees within 20 minutes and reach 140 degrees after 40 minutes. Small cars can have temperatures that reach as high as 178 degrees, she said. Cracking the windows open a bit doesn’t offer much relief, she said, noting interior temperatures still can reach up to 158 degrees.

That’s deadly for a baby, whose body is 70 percent water but has small sweat glands, preventing them from cooling down quickly, Verma said.

In the past 15 years, 606 children in the United States died of heatstroke after being left in a car, said Carol Ann Giardelli, director of Safe Kids New Jersey. Half of those cases were attributed to parents who forgot the children were there; 29 percent occurred because of children getting access to unlocked cars and 18 percent of the cases were from parents who intentionally left their children in the car, Giardelli said.

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“If you think that this could never happen to you, unfortunately you’re sadly mistaken,” Giardelli said.

It’s not unheard of for harried parents – especially when their schedules change – to forget their son or daughter is in the back seat and they’re responsible for drop off at day care that day, Giardelli said. She suggested that parents always put in the backseat something they’ll need to take with them for the day, forcing them to open the back door.

It’s one suggestion that Pekarofski said she’ll adopt from now on by putting her purse in the back seat.