This story was originally published on Inside Climate News. It is reproduced as part of a collaboration with Climate Desk. William Salas Jiminez, a farmworker in California’s Central Valley who worked under the sun’s scorching rays, endured stifling temperatures for most of July 2019. The temperatures had dropped from 99 to 95 degrees F.
As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, this article, which was first published by Inside Climate News, is reproduced around.
Farmworkers like William Salas Jiminez toiled under the scorching sun for the majority of July 2019 as oppressive heat hung over the agrarian fields of California’s Central Valley. The 56-year-old Puerto Rico native was installing irrigation tubing in an almond orchard near Arvin, at the southwestern edge of the valley, after temperatures had dropped from 99 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit.
Salas took a seat to relax around 1:30 that afternoon. He abruptly passed out as he got to his feet to resume his work. After an hour and a half, he passed away. Salas reportedly passed away from a heart attack, according to reports submitted to the US Department of Occupational Health and Safety, or OSHA.
Atherosclerotic heart disease is listed as the immediate cause of death on Salas ‘ death certificate. However, it also mentions obesity and “extreme heat exposure” as important contributors. Obesity and heart disease both raise the risk of catastrophic heatstroke.
Although OSHA proposed a rule in 2021—50 years after public health officials initially suggested cautious measures—no federal standard protects workers from extreme heat. California is one of the five states with the strictest requirements and was the first to pass a heat exposure standard. Working in hot, polluted air, however, poses an extremely dangerous threat to agricultural workers in a warming world, which is not acknowledged by the standard.
Only two California farmworkers perished from heat exposure between 2018 and 2022, according to the monthly report from California OSHA, or Cal/OSHA.
However, a review of federal farmworker death records by Inside Climate News, along with information on air pollution and temperature, raises the possibility that the number is significantly higher. Between 2018 and 2022, dozens of farmworkers perished in California when temperatures rose above the point where the state’s heat safety regulations were in effect. These fatalities all took place in counties with persistently bad air quality.
Within a day of their passing, 83 of the 168 farmworkers who passed away unexpectedly while working in California between 2018 and 2022 died when temperatures rose above 80 degrees Fahrenheit—when employers must provide enough fresh water, shade, and rest to cool down. 36 of these 83 employees passed away from heart attacks, strokes, or other cardiovascular diseases, as well as mysterious or “natural causes” or unknown underlying health conditions. Twelve people died from respiratory illnesses, including COVID-19, and one person passed away from methamphetamine toxicity. The various 34 perished as a result of injuries sustained in accidents. Heat stress is known to raise the risk of dying from breathing and vascular diseases like COVID-19, drug use, and workplace accidents.
When people with underlying heart or lung conditions should abstain from prolonged or strenuous outdoor activities, the air quality in three of these cases was “unhealthy for sympathetic groups” due to the presence of dangerous PM2.5 particles within a day of the worker’s death. However, every county they worked in received a failing grade for short-term particle pollution in the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report, even if the air quality was standard on the days workers died from the heat.
Scientists are learning more about the intricate web of elements that interact with heat to bring about illness and death. They are aware that even in temperatures below the lower 80s, workers can still pass away from heat stroke. They are aware that the number of heat-related injuries and fatalities is greatly understated by current reporting standards. Additionally, they have found that short-term exposure to heat and great particle pollution at the same time, which are both fatal in and of themselves, may be especially lethal.
According to Paul English, an environmental epidemiologist and the director of the Public Health Institute’s Tracking California project, which aims to enhance open health, it would take a thorough investigation to determine whether heat or air pollution caused the deaths Inside Climate News identified, but it is obvious that farmworkers in California are at higher risk.
According to English, great heat conditions stress the heart, according to scientific literature. ” And there’s been an increasing amount of research into how heart attacks, hospitalizations, and emergency room visits are related to air pollution and little particle pollution.”
Researchers published their findings in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology in October. Between 1990 and 2019, the incidence of fatal heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events connected to high temperatures increased tenfold worldwide. Over the course of only a few hours, exposure to higher levels of fine-particle pollution can result in cardiovascular-related deaths.
According to a recent study from China that was published in the journal Circulation, small particles can interact with higher heat to double the risk of fatal heart attacks. The researchers warned that it’s unclear how well the findings hold true for different geographical areas. However, the study supports earlier research showing that co-exposure increases the risk of death. Additionally, the San Joaquin Valley has the worst PM2.5 pollution in the country, accounting for three-quarters of all fatalities there.
Sameed Khatana, a cardiologist and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, said,” It’s challenging to say which aspect of an exposure especially led to someones heart attack or stroke.” However, it is evident from population-level data that “more people seem to die from heart attacks and other causes because well” when extreme heat or bad air days occur.
A spokesperson for the Department of Industrial Relations, which houses Cal/OSHA, declined to respond when asked if the organization would change its standards in light of fresh data showing that exposure to heat and PM2.5 at the same time doubles death rates. Instead, he stated that the agency still upholds its rules for preventing heat illnesses and providing protection from light smoke, the latter of which emitsPM2.
Finding out whether heat contributed to a particular person’s death is, in the opinion of Daniel Smith, an assistant professor at Villanova University, the” chicken or egg” question.
According to Smith,” If a worker had n’t been working in the heat,” they probably would not have passed away from myocardial infarction, renal failure, dehydration, or heat stroke.”
The San Joaquin Valley is the world’s most effective agricultural region. However, the escalating temperatures and persistent air pollution make it a riskier place to work.
Five different farmworkers passed away unexpectedly in just over four weeks during the month of 2019 when Salas was killed, in counties with a reputation for having poor air quality, at temperatures between 85 and 95 degrees.
A 63-year-old man hopped on a tractor at six in the morning on July 18 to spray pesticides into fields. He therefore parked his rig earlier the next day next to some cornfields. After his shift ended, he failed to return home, and his concerned relatives went looking for him. When they discovered his body in the cornfield after 8 p.m., it was still the small 90s. No indication of the cause of death was made. A 50-year-old man was chopping weeds in a raisin vineyard before lunch three days prior when he became ill and sat down to rest. A short while later, his supervisor spotted him face-down in the underbrush. According to OSHA records, he passed away from a respiratory arrest. A teenager was operating a tractor on the afternoon of July 5 when it ran over and killed him three weeks before he turned 19 years old. Nobody is aware of how he got off the tractor. A young woman had become ill while working in a vineyard only two weeks prior, and after convulsing on the way to the hospital, she passed out. According to investigators, the 20-year-old suffered an aneurysm and passed away at the hospital. A 30-year-old man stopped cutting down pistachio trees less than 24 hours prior to drink water and rest in his truck, where he passed away. Heart attack, according to OSHA records.
Mayra Reiter, project director of Occupational Safety and Health for the nonprofit Farmworker Justice, said,” Unfortunately, it is not surprising to hear about so many farmworkers deaths that are likely related to the conditions they face in the workplace, including exposure to excessive heat and air pollution.”
According to proponents like Reiter, farm work is now among the riskiest professions, and climate change is making it perhaps riskier.
According to California’s Third Climate Change Assessment, the valley is possible to experience a threefold increase in extreme heat days. Numerous times, its counties fall short of provincial particle pollution standards.
Burning fossil fuels in cars, factories, and power plants, burning wood in homes, agrarian emissions, wildfires, among other sources produces PM2.5, a mixture of tiny particles that are difficult to see under bare microscopes.
Along with agricultural fields outside of Arvin in Kern County, where persistently higher levels of PM2.5 increase the risks of working in heat for farm workers, oil rigs also emit great particle pollution, or MP2.5. Liza Gross/Inside Climate News is credited.
The risk of fatal cardiovascular and cerebral events can rise as a result of the fine particles ‘ ability to linger in the air for weeks, lodge deep within the lungs, enter the bloodstream, and harm almost all organs, including the brain.
According to Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania,” there is growing evidence that there is probably no safe level when it comes to particulate matter.”
The lungs, heart, and kidneys are put under stress as a result of heat, which makes the body work harder to maintain its internal temperature. As blood vessels enlarge and blood pressure falls, the heart pumps more forcefully and quickly, which lowers blood flow and oxygen to the brain and raises the risk of fatal heart attacks and breathing distress.
Researchers reported in a 2021 review of heat and health risks in The Lancet that heat-triggered damage to the lungs and heart, along with preexisting cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and raised air pollution, are the leading causes of death during heat waves.
The prevalence of these conditions among farmworkers is something that researchers are only now beginning to understand. In a University of California, Merced Community and Labor Center survey conducted in February, more than one-third of farmworkers in California reported having good or poor health. The survey backs up earlier research that found farmworkers are more likely to develop serious illnesses like diabetes, obesity, asthma, and high blood pressure and cholesterol, which increase their susceptibility to the heat.
Recognizing the risk that heat poses for people with a preexisting condition is crucial, according to Villanova’s Smith. Even if they have an actual arrhythmia, workers should be able to work and support themselves in a setting that is secure enough.
Even if they have an actual arrhythmia, workers should be able to work and support themselves in a setting that is secure enough.
While encouraging growers to have systems in place to contact emergency workers to respond to heat-stress cases, the California Farm Bureau declined to comment when contacted.
Additionally, heat can increase pesticide vaporization, which increases agrochemical exposure and application rates.
According to a UC Merced Labor Center study, the average annual wage of workers in the region’s$ 37 billion agricultural market is$ 21, 915 in 2019, which increases their risks. They frequently continue working even when the threat of heat and bad air threatens their lives.
According to Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, “it’s quite simple to forget that there are people behind the food you eat every day.” ” To recognize and reject the cost associated with our food, we must find ways to protect these workers as well as more humanity within ourselves.”
Over the past 20 years, the number of deaths from heat stroke among exterior workers has increased, and temperatures have risen as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. A 2016 analysis of national labor statistics found that agrarian workers have a risk of heat-related deaths that is more than 35 times higher than that of other occupations.
According to Rosemary Sokas, a doctor and workplace health specialist at Georgetown University, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps track of worker heat-related fatalities, injuries, and illnesses, has been counting on 40 deaths annually in recent years. That, however, is just the tip of the iceberg.
For starters, bureau statistics do n’t take into account the fact that the majority of farm jobs are part-time and exclude farms with fewer than 11 employees. Additionally, Sokas clarified that the bureau’s heat fatality statistics do not take into account the number of” slips, trips, and falls,” which result in about 700 deaths annually across occupations. Accidents or fatalities caused by worker overheating are also not common.
However, as people become more fragile, exhausted, disorganized, and clumsy, accidents at work increase along with temperature. According to studies, heat stress affects mental function, concentration, and reaction time, which can result in catastrophic accidents and injuries like falling from a ladder while picking fruit.
An examination of nearly 20 years ‘ worth of worker compensation claims revealed that the Bureau of Labor Statistics may be missing thousands of heat-related illnesses across occupations. According to the bureau’s records, up to six times as numerous claims were made in California for heat-related illnesses ( both indoor and outdoor ).
According to preliminary findings of a similar review of California workers ‘ compensation claims, high temperatures caused about 20, 000 additional injuries annually, including injuries that appeared to be unrelated to temperature, such as severing limbs in machinery or being struck by car,
According to Jisung Park, a public policy researcher at UCLA who led the study, the evidence suggests that the actual number of heat-related illnesses may be 10 times higher than the standard record. He made this claim in September at the meeting of the newly established state-mandated heat expert committee. Park remarked,” We should be concerned about a much wider range of fundamentally related accidents that are nonetheless increased due to hotter temperatures,” not only heat illnesses.
Between 2018 and 2022, tractors, farm equipment, or harmful chemicals were involved in more than 75 percent of the accidents that killed California farmworkers.
According to Juanita Constible, top advocate for climate and health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC,” Federal OSHA officials have been making the case that the data available are underestimates throughout the rulemaking, which has been going on for two years today.”
Constible discovered in an NRDC report released last year that the lack of trustworthy data is partially caused by employers ‘ and employees ‘ failure to report, as well as their concern that they will lose their jobs or, if they are undocumented, be deported. Undocumented Californian workers are eligible for workers ‘ comp, but many are hesitant to submit a claim for fear that it will be used against them or because they lack the literacy to complete the necessary paperwork.
In Kern County, a tractor in an agricultural field causes dust to be kicked up, which worsens the area’s persistently poor air quality and increases the risks that farmworkers face from working in the heat. Liza Gross/Inside Climate News is credited.
According to an OSHA memo outlining efforts to reduce heat-related incidents, health examiners may list the cause of death as a heart attack or similar condition when the actual or worsening cause may have been heat- related. This is because there are no standard criteria for categorizing deaths that are related to heat.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heat exposure causes about 700 deaths annually in the United States. However, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Khatana, when researchers look beyond what is listed on a death certificate, they discover that heat-related deaths are significantly more common.
According to Khatana, a study on excess deaths linked to intense heat among American adults that was published last year in JAMA Open Network suggests that the number of deaths could be as high as 2, 000 or more per year. ” Yet higher levels have been suggested by another studies.”
Khatana and his associates continued by demonstrating that half of those fatalities were caused by heat-related heart attacks and strokes.
Because their pay frequently depends on how far they harvest, farmworkers are especially susceptible to heat-related fatalities.
However, according to NRDC’s Constible, the California standard does not specify how employers should ensure employees adjust to the heat or how nearby water and shade should be. ” For farmworkers, that’s a special problem because they work in large fields and frequently have to walk swiftly on very brief breaks to try and get some water before returning to their work.
Additionally, about a fourth of farmworkers are not proficient in English or Spanish and speak Indigenous languages like Mixteco or Triqui. They are less likely to complain when their employer does n’t give them enough breaks, shade, or water or to receive training on language heat.
According to advocates, this means that employees might not recognize a fast heartbeat, excessive sweating, or headaches as symptoms of unsafe heat stress.
The responsibility of Cal/OSHA inspectors is to ensure that employers carry out heat-illness training and prevention programs. Garrett Brown, a former Cal/OSHA investigator who retired in 2014 and monitors what he calls the agency’s decline, claims that only 14 inspection officers for the whole state speak Spanish and none speak an Indigenous language.
More than 100 field enforcement positions were empty as of October, according to Brown, and state offices are greatly understaffed. Also if every opening were filled, Cal/OSHA would only have one inspector for every 100,000 employees, a ratio Brown referred to as “ridiculous.”
According to Brown, there is a 60 % vacancy in some district offices. That implies that there is n’t any enforcement there at all.
According to a spokesperson for the Department of Industrial Relations, Cal/OSHA is “diligently” hiring health and safety personnel to carry out inspections across the state. It is difficult to find and keep skilled experts.
In a 2020 analysis that was published in the American Journal of Public Health, two former top OSHA administrators argued that even with enforcement, light economic penalties, and poor criminal sanctions, employers who cut corners and put employees in danger still fail to deter them.
An Inside Climate News review of Cal/OSHA citations found that penalties were reduced in almost half of the cases for an ordinary fine of$ 2, 625, out of more than 1, 000 heat tickets issued to agrarian employers in California since 2018. Employers of more than 215 had at least two violations.
Constible, who reviewed OSHA citations and penalties against employers who violated California’s heat standard for the NRDC report, stated that” the penalties and level of enforcement just are n’t enough to keep workers safe.”
Employers have the proper to challenge any citation or penalty, according to a Department of Industrial Relations spokesperson. Monetary penalties are set by regulations. In the end, the spokesperson said,” Employers are accountable for keeping a workplace free of safety and health hazards.”
However, in Constible’s opinion, Cal/OSHA is never adequately addressing the pattern of “using and abusing workers.” She said,” I expect better from California,” despite the fact that it’s a problem all over the nation.
According to Reiter of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Cal/OSHA must unquestionably step up its inspections to ensure that employers are abiding by California’s heat standard and that employees are receiving the protections they are entitled to.
Reiter stated that the immediate need for a federal standard is being understated by the fact that what is happening in California is likely occurring in states without heat regulations. ” Farmworkers should n’t have to perish before we can eat.” As part of the Climate Desk collaboration, this article, which was originally published by Inside Climate News, is reproduced below. Farmworkers like William Salas Jiminez toiled under the sun’s piercing rays for the majority of July 2019 as oppressive heat hung over the agrarian fields of the Central Valley of California. From 99 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures had dropped.
This story was originally published on Inside Climate News. It is reproduced as part of a collaboration with Climate Desk. William Salas Jiminez, a farmworker in California’s Central Valley who worked under the sun’s scorching rays, endured stifling temperatures for most of July 2019. The temperatures had dropped from 99 to 95 degrees F.
Gosia Wozniacka/AP. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.. This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.. For most of July 2019, stifling heat hung over the agricultural fields of California’s Central Valley, as farmworkers like William Salas Jiminez labored under the sun’s searing rays. Temperatures had dipped from 99 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit the last day of the month, when the 56-year-old Puerto Rico native was installing irrigation tubing in an almond orchard near Arvin, at the valley’s southern edge.. Around 1:30 that afternoon, Salas sat down to rest. When he stood up to go back to work, he suddenly collapsed. An hour and a half later, he was dead. Reports filed with the US Department of Occupational Health and Safety, or OSHA, say Salas died of a heart attack.. Salas’ death certificate lists atherosclerotic heart disease as the immediate cause of death. But it also lists “extreme heat exposure” and obesity as significant contributors. Both heart disease and obesity increase the risk of fatal heatstroke.. No federal standard protects workers from extreme heat, though OSHA proposed a rule in 2021—a half-century after public health officials first recommended precautionary measures. California was the first of the five states that have passed a heat exposure standard and its requirements are considered among the toughest. Yet the standard doesn’t recognize an increasingly dangerous threat for agricultural laborers in a warming world: working in hot, polluted air.. According to the 2022 annual report from California OSHA, or Cal/OSHA, just two California farmworkers died from heat exposure between 2018 and 2022.. But an Inside Climate News review of federal farmworker death records, along with temperature and air pollution data, suggests the numbers may be much higher. Scores of farmworkers died in California between 2018 and 2022 when temperatures exceeded the threshold that triggers California’s heat safety requirements. All of these deaths occurred in counties with chronically unsafe air.. Eighty-three of the 168 farmworkers who died suddenly at work in California from 2018 to 2022 perished when temperatures exceeded 80 degrees Fahrenheit—when employers must provide adequate fresh water, shade, and rest to cool down—within a day of their death. Thirty-six of these 83 workers died of heart attacks, strokes, or other cardiovascular diseases; unspecified underlying medical conditions; or unknown or “natural causes.” Twelve died of respiratory conditions, including COVID-19, and one died of methamphetamine toxicity. The other 34 died from injuries sustained in accidents. Heat stress is known to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular and respiratory conditions, including COVID-19, drug use, and workplace accidents.. In three of these cases, air quality for hazardous tiny particles called PM2.5 within a day of a worker’s death was also “unhealthy for sensitive groups,” when people with underlying heart or lung conditions should minimize long or intense outdoor activities. But even if the air quality was normal on the days workers died in the heat, every county they worked in received a failing grade for short-term particle pollution in the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report.. Scientists are gaining new insights into the complex constellation of factors that interact with heat to cause illness and death. They know workers can die of heat stroke even when temperatures fall below the low 80s. They know existing reporting measures vastly underestimate heat-related injuries and deaths. And they’ve discovered that simultaneous short-term exposure to heat and fine particle pollution, both deadly on their own, may be particularly lethal.. It would take a rigorous study to determine whether heat or air pollution triggered the deaths Inside Climate News identified, but it is clear that California’s farmworkers are at high risk, said Paul English, an environmental epidemiologist and director of the Public Health Institute’s Tracking California, a project aimed at improving public health.. The scientific literature shows that conditions of high heat stress the heart, English said. “And there’s been more and more research about air pollution and small particle pollution being related to heart attacks and to hospitalizations and emergency room visits for heart attacks.”. The incidence of fatal heart attacks, strokes, and other cardiovascular events linked to high temperatures increased sevenfold globally between 1990 and 2019, researchers reported in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology in October. Exposure to high levels of fine-particle pollution over just a few hours can trigger cardiovascular-related deaths.. Fine particles can interact with high heat to double the risk of fatal heart attacks when compared with either exposure in isolation, a recent study in China published in the journal Circulation found. It’s unclear how well the results apply to other geographic regions, the researchers cautioned. But the study corroborates previous evidence that co-exposure heightens the risk of death. And the San Joaquin Valley, where three-quarters of the deaths occurred, has the worst PM2.5 pollution in the nation.. “It’s difficult to say which aspect of an exposure specifically led to someone’s heart attack or stroke,” said Sameed Khatana, a cardiologist and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine. But it’s clear from population-level data that when extreme heat or bad air days occur, he said, “more people seem to die from heart attacks and other causes as well.”. When asked if Cal/OSHA will revise its standards in light of new evidence that simultaneous exposure to heat and PM2.5 doubles death rates, a spokesperson for the Department of Industrial Relations, which houses Cal/OSHA, did not address the question but said the agency continues to enforce its rules for heat illness prevention and protection from wildfire smoke, which emits PM2.5.. For Daniel Smith, an assistant professor at Villanova University’s College of Nursing, working out whether heat played a role in a specific person’s death is a classic chicken or egg question.. “If a worker hadn’t been working in the heat,” Smith said, “they likely would have never died from the myocardial infarction, the renal failure, the dehydration, the heat stroke.”. The San Joaquin Valley is the most productive agricultural region in the world. But rising temperatures and chronic air pollution make it an increasingly dangerous place to work.. In just over four weeks during the month in 2019 when Salas died, five other farmworkers died abruptly when temperatures were between 85 and 95 degrees in counties with notoriously bad air quality.. At 6 a.m. on July 18, a 63-year-old man climbed onto a tractor to spray fields with pesticides, then parked his rig alongside a cornfield in the early afternoon. When he failed to come home after his shift ended, his worried relatives went looking for him. It was still in the low 90s after 8 p.m., when they found his body in the cornfield. No cause of death was given. Three days earlier, a 50-year-old man was chopping weeds before lunch in a raisin vineyard when he started feeling sick and sat down to rest. Minutes later his supervisor saw him facedown under the vines. OSHA records say he died of cardiac arrest. On the afternoon of July 5, a teenager had been driving a tractor when it ran over and killed him three weeks before his 19th birthday. No one knows how he got off the tractor. Just two weeks earlier, a young woman had taken ill while working in a vineyard and fell into a coma after convulsing on the way to the hospital. The 20-year-old died at the hospital of an aneurysm, investigators said. Less than 24 hours earlier, a 30-year-old man stopped pruning pistachio trees to drink water and rest in his truck, where he died. Heart attack, OSHA records say.. “Sadly, it is not surprising to hear about so many farmworker deaths that are likely related to the conditions they face in the workplace, including exposure to excessive heat and air pollution,” said Mayra Reiter, project director of Occupational Safety and Health for the nonprofit Farmworker Justice.. Farm work is already one of the most dangerous occupations, advocates like Reiter say, and now climate change is making it even riskier.. The valley is likely to see a sevenfold increase in extreme heat days, California’s Fourth Climate Change Assessment predicts. Its counties repeatedly fail to meet federal particle pollution standards.. PM2.5, a mixture of fine particles too small to see with a conventional microscope, results from burning fossil fuels in vehicles, factories, and power plants and burning wood in homes, agricultural emissions, and wildfires, among other sources.. Oil rigs release fine particle pollution, or PM2.5, alongside agricultural fields outside Arvin in Kern County, where chronically high levels of PM2.5 enhance the risks of working in heat for farm workers. Credit: Liza Gross/Inside Climate News. Fine particles can linger in air for weeks, lodge deep in the lungs, enter the bloodstream, and damage nearly every organ in the body, including the brain, increasing the risk of deadly coronary and cerebrovascular events.. “When it comes to particulate matter, there’s growing evidence that there is probably no safe level,” said Khatana of the University of Pennsylvania.. Heat forces the body to work harder to keep its internal temperature in check, straining the lungs, heart, and kidneys. The heart pumps harder and faster as blood vessels dilate and blood pressure drops, reducing blood flow and oxygen to the brain and increasing the risk of fatal heart attack and respiratory distress.. Heat-triggered damage to the lungs and heart, combined with preexisting cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and elevated air pollution, are the leading causes of death during heat waves, researchers reported in a 2021 review of heat and health risks in The Lancet.. Researchers are just starting to get a handle on the prevalence of these conditions among farmworkers. More than a third of California farmworkers rated their health as fair or poor in a University of California, Merced Community and Labor Center survey published in February. The survey supports earlier research showing a higher prevalence of chronic diseases among farmworkers that increases their vulnerability to heat, including elevated blood pressure and cholesterol, diabetes, obesity and asthma.. Villanova’s Smith called it imperative to recognize the danger heat poses for people with a preexisting condition. “Workers should be able to work and earn a living in an environment that is safe enough for them to work, even if they have an underlying arrhythmia.”. “Workers should be able to work and earn a living in an environment that is safe enough for them to work, even if they have an underlying arrhythmia.”. The California Farm Bureau did not respond to a request to comment, but encourages growers to have systems in place to contact emergency workers to respond to heat-stress cases.. Heat can also boost pesticide vaporization, leading to higher application rates and increased exposure to agrochemicals.. Adding to their risks, workers who fuel the region’s $37 billion agricultural market earn so little—an average annual wage of $21,915 in 2019, according to a UC Merced Labor Center study—they often keep working when heat and unhealthy air conspire to threaten their lives.. “It’s very easy to forget that there are people behind the food you eat every day,” said Kristina Dahl, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “We have to find ways to protect these workers, but also find more humanity in ourselves to recognize and not accept the cost that is associated with our food.”. Death from heat stroke among outdoor workers has risen over the past two decades along with temperatures driven higher and higher by the burning of fossil fuels. Agricultural workers face more than 35 times the risk of heat-related deaths than other occupations, a 2016 analysis of federal labor statistics found.. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which records worker heat-related fatalities, injuries, and illnesses, has been counting about 40 fatalities per year in recent years, Rosemary Sokas, a physician and occupational health expert at Georgetown University, told the New England Journal of Medicine in a podcast in October. “But that’s the tip of the iceberg.”. For one thing, bureau statistics exclude farms with fewer than 11 employees and don’t account for the part-time nature of most farm jobs. Plus, the number of “slips, trips and falls,” which cause some 700 deaths a year across occupations, aren’t included in the bureau’s heat fatality statistics, Sokas explained. Neither are fatal injuries or accidents that happened when workers were overheated.. Yet accidents on the job rise with temperature, as people grow increasingly weak, fatigued, uncoordinated and disoriented. Heat stress impairs cognitive function, concentration and reaction time, studies show, leading to fatal injuries and accidents like falling from a ladder while harvesting fruit.. The Bureau of Labor Statistics may be missing thousands of heat-related illnesses across occupations, an analysis of nearly two decades of workers’ compensation claims found. Up to six times as many of the claims were filed for (both indoor and outdoor) heat-related illness in California than the bureau’s records captured.. Preliminary results of a similar review of California workers’ comp claims found that high temperatures resulted in roughly 20,000 additional injuries a year, including injuries seemingly unrelated to temperature like severing a limb in machinery or getting run over by a vehicle,. The evidence suggests that the true number of heat-related illnesses may be 10 times higher than the official record, Jisung Park, a public policy researcher at UCLA who led the study, said in September during a meeting of a new state-mandated heat advisory committee. “It isn’t just heat illnesses we should be worried about,” Park said, “but also a much wider range of ostensibly unrelated accidents that are nevertheless increased due to hotter temperatures.”. More than three-quarters of the accidents that killed California farmworkers between 2018 and 2022 involved fatal encounters with tractors, farm machinery, or toxic chemicals.. “Federal OSHA officials have been making the case all through the rulemaking, which has been going on for two years now, that the data available are underestimates,” said Juanita Constible, senior advocate for climate and health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC.. The lack of reliable data stems partly from a lack of reporting by employers and by workers who fear they’ll lose their job or, if they’re undocumented, get deported, Constible found in an NRDC report published last year. Although undocumented California workers are eligible for workers’ comp, many are wary of filing a claim they fear could be used against them or lack the literacy to fill out the paperwork.. A tractor in an agricultural field in Kern County kicks up dust, which contributes to the region’s chronically bad air quality and adds to the risks farmworkers face from working in heat. Credit: Liza Gross/Inside Climate News. Because there are no standard criteria for classifying heat-related deaths, medical examiners may list the cause of death as a heart attack or similar condition when the actual or aggravating cause may have been heat-related, an OSHA memo outlining efforts to reduce heat-related incidents said.. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention relies on death records to estimate that about 700 people die from heat exposure in the United States a year. But when researchers look beyond what’s recorded on a death certificate, they see a much greater incidence of deaths associated with heat, said the University of Pennsylvania’s Khatana.. “Papers like ours suggest that the number of deaths could be as high as 2,000 or more a year,” Khatana said, referring to a study of excess deaths associated with extreme heat among U.S. adults published last year in JAMA Open Network. “Other studies have suggested even higher levels.”. Khatana and his colleagues went on to show that heat triggered heart attacks and strokes in half of those deaths.. Farmworkers are particularly vulnerable to heat-related fatalities because their pay often depends on how much they harvest.. Yet California’s standard doesn’t outline the steps employers should take to ensure workers adjust to the heat or how close water and shade should be, said NRDC’s Constible. “For farmworkers, that’s a particular problem because they’re working in big fields and often have to walk quickly on a very short break to try and get some water and then go back to where they were working.”. What’s more, about a third of farmworkers speak Indigenous languages like Mixteco or Triqui and are not fluent in English or Spanish. They’re less likely to receive training about heat in their language or to complain when their employer doesn’t provide adequate breaks, shade or water.. That means workers may not recognize a rapid heartbeat, heavy sweating or headaches as a sign of dangerous heat stress, advocates say.. Cal/OSHA inspectors are tasked with making sure employers implement heat-illness training and prevention plans. Yet the agency has just 14 inspection officers for the entire state who speak Spanish and none who speak an Indigenous language, according to Garrett Brown, a former Cal/OSHA investigator who retired in 2014 and tracks what he calls the agency’s decline.. State offices are severely understaffed, with more than 100 field enforcement positions unfilled as of October, Brown said. Even if all the vacancies were filled, Cal/OSHA would have just one inspector for every 110,000 workers, a ratio Brown called “ridiculous.”. Some of the district offices have a 60 percent vacancy, Brown said. “That means there’s no enforcement there at all.”. Cal/OSHA is “diligently” hiring health and safety staff to conduct inspections across the state, a Department of Industrial Relations spokesperson said, noting that it is challenging to recruit and retain qualified experts.. Even when there is enforcement, small financial penalties, and weak criminal sanctions fail to deter employers who cut corners and endanger workers, two former top OSHA administrators argued in a 2020 analysis published in the American Journal of Public Health.. Of more than 1,000 heat citations issued to agricultural employers in California since 2018, penalties were reduced in nearly half of the cases for an average fine of $2,625, an Inside Climate News review of Cal/OSHA citations found. More than 215 employers had at least two violations.. “The penalties and level of enforcement just aren’t enough to keep workers safe,” said Constible, who reviewed OSHA citations and penalties against employers who violated California’s heat standard for the NRDC report.. Monetary penalties are determined by regulations and employers have the right to contest any citation or penalty, a Department of Industrial Relations spokesperson said. Ultimately, the spokesperson added, “employers bear the responsibility to maintain a workplace free of safety and health hazards.”. Yet as Constible sees it, Cal/OSHA is not sufficiently addressing the pattern of “using and abusing workers.” Although it’s a problem all across the country, she said, “I expect better from California.”. Cal/OSHA clearly needs to increase its inspections to make sure that employers are complying with California’s heat standard and workers are getting the protections they are entitled to, said Reiter, of the Union of Concerned Scientists.. “What is happening in California is probably happening in states with no heat regulations, underscoring the urgent need for a federal standard,” Reiter said. “Farmworkers should not have to die in order for us to eat.”
