The nice thing about winter is that when you leave a bottle of water in your car it will still be ice cold the next morning. Leaving bottled water in your car during the summer though can be seriously dangerous - way more than you might think.

I don't know about you but I am definitely guilty of doing this. After being reminded though about what happened to a battery technician with the Idaho Power Company a few years ago, I'll no longer leave plastic water bottles in my car.

The technician was on his lunch break when he noticed there was smoke coming up from the center console of his truck. He soon learned it was his plastic water bottle that was responsible. “I looked over and noticed light was being refracted through a water bottle and starting to catch the seat on fire,” he said in a video shared on the company’s Facebook page. Two burn marks were left on the seat!

As it goes to show, leaving a plastic water bottle in your car on a hot sunny day can be really dangerous.  David Richardson, a spokesperson for the Midwest City Fire Department, explained to TODAY, "on a sunny day, the light shines through the front windshield, through the full water bottle and that water focuses the light — and its heat — onto one point. That concentrated beam can exceed 400 degrees on a darker surface within seconds. That's hot enough to spark a fire."

As we enter these triple digit temperatures remember that although the risk of this happening is low it can still be disastrous. Take your bottled water with you this summer when you leave your car!

LOOK: Here are the 50 best beach towns in America

Every beach town has its share of pluses and minuses, which got us thinking about what makes a beach town the best one to live in. To find out, Stacker consulted data from WalletHub, released June 17, 2020, that compares U.S. beach towns. Ratings are based on six categories: affordability, weather, safety, economy, education and health, and quality of life. The cities ranged in population from 10,000 to 150,000, but they had to have at least one local beach listed on TripAdvisor. Read the full methodology here. From those rankings, we selected the top 50. Readers who live in California and Florida will be unsurprised to learn that many of towns featured here are in one of those two states.

Keep reading to see if your favorite beach town made the cut.

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