Dangerous dog days of summer

Florida’s outdoor workers face increasing dangers as rising temperatures and humidity push the limits of safety. ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Many Floridians get to work in comfortably air-conditioned offices during the summer.

But many also don’t — and they could be in danger.

We’re talking about more than 630,000 construction workers, more than 100,000 of the nation’s million farm laborers, and likely a total of about 2 million people in the state working outside now, during the historically hottest spring and summer months on record, industry experts say.

Everyone who works outdoors is potentially subject to dangerous heat conditions — dangerous, in part, because it’s more complicated than the mere reading on a thermometer might suggest.

Adding to the heat, itself, are other mitigating factors: Clothing requirements for their jobs. Proper hydration levels to start a workday, not just sustain it through to the end. Age and medical condition of workers, medications they may be taking, and alcohol, caffeine or sugar that may be in their systems, hastening dehydration.

And, of course, combinations of heat and humidity, a Florida specialty. They’re often too high to allow sweat to evaporate from the surface of the skin, the body’s natural cooling system.

The pressure to keep working in Florida’s extreme heat can have life-threatening consequences for outdoor laborers. COURTESY PHOTO

“We are developing an 11-point program that is adapted to conditions for workers in Florida,” said Paul Monaghan, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural Education and Communication at the University of Florida’s Institute for Food and Agricultural Services.

“One problem is that heat safety awareness and risk reduction in the workplace is complicated and cannot be solved by one training or the distribution of educational materials. In terms of guidelines, raising awareness is a priority, along with prevention (water, rest, shade), recognizing symptoms of heat-related illness and first aid treatment. It is still a lot of new information for workers and employers — and all of it is important.

“The program we are developing in the agricultural workplace will address these issues, but it requires changes from employers, supervisors and workers all working together to improve heat safety.”

CHICAS

In the face of this, farm activists and researchers became alarmed when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill in April that forbids cities or counties from enacting local regulations requiring a minimum daily number of drinking and resting periods for outside workers in heat.

It was politics as usual in Florida, however. Other states have passed such laws to help prevent worker injury or even death, but Florida legislators said they were wary of overregulation and government intrusion.

Nobody pointed to Harry Truman’s famous comment: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

Temperatures rising

By all accounts, outdoor work, especially on Florida farms, is much more challenging than the kitchen; it’s strenuous and physically demanding. In a summer on track to set records in the state and country for heat and humidity, Florida has been ranked the state with the highest number of days per year with dangerous combinations of both.

More than 2 million Floridians work outdoors. ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

That fact can rapidly create heated conditions that will, and have, either injured or killed outdoor laborers when their core temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Over 100 in core heat and “it’s a fever without a virus,” explained Roxana Chicas, an assistant professor in the School of Nursing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Chicas has done extensive research in the last decade on farm workers in Florida — the population of outdoor workers most subject to heat injury, statistics show.

“Agricultural workers are 35 times more likely to have heat-related injuries and death than other outdoor workers,” she said.

“They regularly exceed the threshold of 38 degrees Celsius — that’s 100.4 (Fahrenheit). In our study, we found that 43% of farm workers in Florida were exceeding that threshold. Workers were experiencing acute kidney injuries over the course of just one workday. And once you have one episode, you’re at higher risk for chronic kidney disease.” And it’s not just farm workers.

CARVER

Kidneys at risk

“We just did a study within the last year of construction workers in Florida where we also saw acute kidney injury happening,” Chicas said. “So, it’s reasonable to think outdoor workers are having heat-related illness and having renal dysfunction associated with physically demanding work in the heat.”

When Chicas and her colleagues studied a group of farm workers for 2.5 years starting in 2020, they identified about 20% with heat-related kidney injuries from previous work at the beginning.

“They’d had a rise in their serum creatinine of three or more — that’s the international standard necrologists use to define acute kidney injury,” Chicas said. It can go away, but the individual becomes more vulnerable subsequently.

The American Kidney Fund explains it this way: “Creatinine is a waste product in your blood that comes from your muscles. Healthy kidneys filter creatinine out of your blood through your urine. Your serum creatinine level is based on a blood test that measures the amount of creatinine in your blood. It tells how well your kidneys are working.”

Wearing wide-brimmed hats helps protect the head from intense heat. COURTESY PHOTO

Kidneys don’t work efficiently — nor does the rest of your body — if you’re dehydrated.

When Chicas and her team tested those workers again in 2022, the number jumped to 43%, especially in the ornamental fern industry.

Jeannie Economos, coordinator of the Farmworkers Association of Florida based in Apopka, has worked on behalf of the many laborers in fields and nurseries for 25 years. She acknowledges that many farm owners and construction managers are careful to protect their laborers in such high heat — but not all and not enough, she said.

Time is money

Outside, Economos pointed out, “You have the temperature, you have the humidity — so the heat index — but a third factor is exertion. You’re bending, planting, pulling, cutting vegetables, and you’re wearing clothing to protect yourself from pesticides and sunburn, which increases your body temperature.”

How much water and rest are required, even for fit and acclimatized workers?

The University of Florida’s IFAS recommends eight ounces of water every 15 to 30 minutes, and 15-minute breaks “in a cool, shaded place” every two hours. The idea is to avoid the five kinds of heat-related injury: heat rash, fainting or heat syncope, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and the supremely dangerous, life-threatening heat stroke, in which body temperature can rise to 106F or higher in less than 15 minutes.

Unfortunately, victims can suffer heat stroke without first showing heat exhaustion or other symptoms on occasion.

“The farmworkers have supported a good heat-stress bill for six of the past seven years,” Economos said. “That would include access to shade or a place to cool off for outdoor workers; sufficient drinking water — and time to drink it — and breaks. Studies show that if you have time for a break and rest for 10 minutes every couple of hours, your work and production are better.”

Regarding training, workers and managers should be taught “No. 1, how to identify symptoms; No. 2, how to protect themselves; No. 3, first aid; and No. 4, the need to use a buddy system,” Economos said.

In agricultural labor, too, and perhaps unexpectedly, one of the most significant factors in heat illnesses is wages and how they are paid.

Although federal rules established through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration require water and outdoor toilets to be located near farm and other outside laborers, workers don’t always want the breaks if they’re doing piecework — that is, being paid by the pound, for example. The reason is simple: It can take more time than they want to spare. For them, time truly is money.

And if they lack regular and thorough education in heat safety — another tool among the assortment of devices required to prevent heat-related injuries — they won’t always recognize the importance of breaks.

“In general, we need to use all the tools at our disposal to ensure workers can be safe and healthy,” said Miranda Carver Martin, a research coordinator for the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and an associate of the Great Lakes Center for Farmworker Health and Well Being.

“We’re finding workers are (commonly) heavily dehydrated, and they face many barriers to staying healthy,” Martin said.

Farm labor, in particular, is still significantly hands-on.

The weakest link

“Nearly every crop produced in Florida requires labor inputs,” Monaghan explained. “While sugar cane harvesting has become automated, vegetable crops, nurseries, citrus, berries, and even pine straw baling all require workers, primarily immigrants, to be outdoors doing highly strenuous labor. While the fall and winter are the peak seasons of vegetable production in Florida, the temperatures are no less dangerous, and heat stroke is often caused by a combination of factors in addition to the heat index. Also, many crops are still being harvested from May through July in different parts of Florida, some of the hottest and most humid months of the year.”

How they’re paid makes a difference, too, Martin said.

“If they’re paid hourly, they may feel pressure from supervisors to push themselves harder, and in the other pay structure — piece rate pay — they may feel pressure to continue working because their pay depends on (how much) they do.”

It can’t be repeated too much, Martin said: It’s hard, hard work.

“In tomatoes, for example, workers are carrying 40-pound buckets. Picking tomatoes very quickly and skillfully, they’re doing constant work that generates internal heat, hoisting the buckets onto their shoulders, running as fast as they can, and then throwing the buckets up. Someone gives them a token or records it, then they run back out to the field.”

Martin suggests that, when it comes to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration rules about having restrooms and water within workers’ reach, compliance might fare better in theory than in practice.

“A lot of times what compliance looks like is, you have one igloo cooler with a single spigot. When you push the button, water comes out slowly. And the regulations require 4-ounce conical cups, like an office cooler.

“So, if workers are under pressure to produce quickly, they might have to stand in line to get a drink, and they will have to wait for this dispensing of water to fill up these multiple cups if they’re going to get enough to maintain the necessary hydration levels.

“Sometimes, and in cases that are in compliance, there are not enough spigots available to stay safe and healthy in the heat” — unless workers stand patiently in line to fill 4-ounce conical cups repeatedly .

Then there are the bathrooms.

“Bathrooms may be quote-unquote accessible, but they may be at quite a distance. If you have to walk 10 minutes to portable toilets, workers may intentionally dehydrate themselves in order to not have to use the bathroom.”

Like the weakest link in a chain, any part of the whole lost in the shuffle — a failure to educate workers and managers, poor hydration, the wrong clothing, pressure to keep going when exhaustion creeps in, lack of a buddy system in which workers keep an eye on each other — may result in disaster.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, deaths caused by heat are on the rise, just like the heat itself, as a result of climate change.

“Heat-related deaths have been increasing in the U.S., with approximately 1,602 occurring in 2021, 1,722 in 2022 and 2,302 in 2023,” a report indicates.

Almost as dismaying, said Economos, who has watched it happen for a quarter century, are the devastating long-term effects on individuals and families when workers stagger home, unable to fully participate in family life or responsibilities outside the job.

Climate change will mean increasing dangers in the coming years.

“Certainly, climate change is a looming issue, and things are only going to get worse from here,” said Martin. “It can be a life-or-death issue.

“Workers actually die. They go off by themselves, and they’re discovered too late — people thought they were going to the bathroom or taking just a break.”¦

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