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Sara and Katie visit two dozen bus stops across Houston with their high-tech equipment, garnering lots of strange looks and questions from METRO riders, passing cars and bus drivers. They let riders know the question on their minds: just how hot do bus stops get during the never-ending heatwave in Houston this summer? What they found were some extremely hot stops and a budding friendship between two coworkers. 

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"It's like a sweat box," "an easy bake oven," "it's like a desert." This is how METRO riders described Houston bus stops to Sara Willa Ernst and Katie Watkins at the beginning of the summer. This left them wondering just how hot these bus stops can get. No data on the subject exists, so they armed themselves with sunscreen, baseball hats, and a high-tech thermometer and headed to the bus stop to get answers for themselves. What they found lined up with the stories they had heard: dangerously hot temperatures that experts found alarming. Their reporting led them to learn about riders getting sick from the heat and a public transit system ill-prepared to protect its riders from rising temperatures brought by climate change.

Hot Stops: How Houston Bus Stops Get Dangerously Hot premieres on Thursday, September 7th.