Hundreds Of Workers Have Died From Heat In The Last Decade — And It’s Getting Worse
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Cruz Urias Beltran collapsed because of heat-related illness while working in a cornfield near Grand Island, Neb., in 2018. He is one of at least 384 workers who died from environmental heat exposure in the U.S. in the last decade, according to an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations and NPR.
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A family photo of Cruz Urias Beltran taken during the 1990s.
Paty Espinoza
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Paty Espinoza
Yet no worker should die from heat, said Ronda McCarthy, an occupational health specialist who directs medical services at the health care provider Concentra, in Waco, Texas. McCarthy spent seven years educating her home state’s municipal workers about heat, which reduced cases of worker heat exhaustion and similar conditions there.
«Heat illness should be considered a preventable illness, she said.
No federal heat standard
OSHA has known about the dangers of heat — and how to prevent deaths — for decades. In 1972, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied the effects of heat stress on workers in the U.S. and recommended criteria for an OSHA heat standard. Under the proposal, employers would have had to give employees one break every hour and offer ready access to water. New workers would have received extra breaks so they could acclimate to strenuous activity in the heat.
NIOSH has refined these safety measures — first in 1986 and, again, in 2016 — but OSHA has not acted on them because of other regulatory priorities. This year, for the first time, OSHA is officially considering a heat standard by putting it on its regulatory agenda. James Frederick, OSHA’s acting director, said it’s a «priority for the Biden administration.
«Occupational exposure to heat remains a very important topic, Frederick said in an interview with CJI and NPR. «We’re focused on improving our efforts to protect workers moving forward.
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James Frederick, OSHA’s acting director, says heat safety is a «priority for the Biden administration.
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David Michaels (right), then the assistant secretary of labor for occupational safety and health, who oversaw OSHA, attends a committee hearing in 2010.
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Cruz Urias Beltran went missing in the cornfields near Grand Island, Neb., on a day when the temperature — with humidity — felt like 100 degrees.
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Beltran hugs his son, Jesus Adrian Urias Machado. Beltran was an experienced farmworker and traveled from Arizona to work in Nebraska.
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Paty Espinoza
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Karl Simmons was installing turf at Gateway Park in Fort Worth, Texas, when he felt ill. Later, he was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Heatstroke, the autopsy report confirmed.
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Dean Wingo, who formerly oversaw the OSHA regional office that includes Texas, says he believes Hellas Construction’s record on workplace heat safety shows «poor company management.
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The former construction site where Pedro Martinez Jr. died of heatstroke now serves as a recreational facility adjacent to a middle school in Hondo, Texas.
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A fire station warning sign in Fallbrook, Calif. A Cal/OSHA inspection report named heat as a contributing factor in Raymond Araujo’s death while he was training as a firefighter for Cal Fire. But his death was ultimately deemed an accident.
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Cal Fire firefighter Yaroslav «Yaro Katkov was on a routine training exercise when he stumbled and felt exhausted shortly before he collapsed.
Ashley Vallario
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Ashley Vallario
On a standard training exercise, Katkov was asked to complete a 1.45-mile loop at Cal Fire’s rural Station 16 in Fallbrook, a remote mountainous area halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. As they traversed the loop, the captain and the co-worker noticed Katkov lagging behind the required 30-minute deadline to finish the hike. The two stopped on several occasions to allow Katkov to catch up, delaying their end time by 10 minutes. The temperature would climb to 88 degrees that day — 5 degrees hotter than the 40-year average.
The captain, Joe Ekblad, recognized that Katkov hadn’t given his body enough of a rest yet but ordered the firefighters to repeat the exercise, according to the Cal/OSHA records. On the way up the steepest incline of the loop, Katkov stumbled and told his supervisor he felt exhausted — two telltale signs of heat stress. He collapsed on the hilltop, was airlifted to a hospital nearly two hours later and died of heat illness the next day.
«He loved the idea of being like a wildland firefighter, said Ashley Vallario, Katkov’s fiancée. «It made him happy.
This time, Cal/OSHA investigated Katkov’s death, interviewing eyewitnesses. The inspector detailed extensive failures by the captain, which led to his demotion. The agency found that Cal Fire had failed to stop the hike and seek emergency medical treatment even after Katkov had exhibited heat-related symptoms. Regulators levied a fine of $80,000 — almost five times the average Cal/OSHA fine of $17,000 in these cases.
Neither Cal Fire nor Ekblad responded to requests for comment.
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Yaro Katkov was assigned to Cal Fire/San Diego County Fire’s De Luz Station 16 in Fallbrook. He died of heat illness after a training exercise in the area.
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The cornfield where Cruz Urias Beltran’s body was found near Grand Island, Neb.
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The cornfield where Cruz Urias Beltran’s body was found near Grand Island, Neb.
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«Every time OSHA proposes a standard, [the] industry accuses OSHA of killing jobs and destroying whatever industry is going to be regulated, said Jordan Barab, a former deputy assistant labor secretary who helped shepherd two chemical-exposure standards through protracted rule-making processes. «That would probably follow with a heat standard.
Some states have decided not to wait. In June, as an unprecedented heat wave blanketed the Pacific Northwest, Sebastian Francisco Perez moved irrigation pipes at a nursery in Willamette Valley, Oregon. Perez was found dead at the end of his shift. Preliminary information suggests the incident was heat related, but Oregon Occupational Safety and Health (Oregon OSHA) has yet to make a determination, according to Aaron Corvin, a spokesman for Oregon OSHA. Ten days later, the state enacted an emergency heat standard.
Back in Grand Island, Neb., where the average high temperature has increased 2 degrees since the 1990s, the intensifying heat is not lost on Joseph Rivera. As a younger man in the fields, he remembers there were hot and humid days. But now the heat is so extreme, he said, «you get these hot days that just come up over you.
«With climate change, you hit 112 in Nebraska the other day, Rivera said, explaining why he’s amenable to a federal heat standard. «It’s going to be like this every year.
Christina Stella, a reporter with Nebraska Public Media, Jacob Margolis, a reporter with KPCC in Los Angeles, and Allison Mollenkamp, an intern on NPR’s investigative team, contributed to this story. Julia Shipley, Brian Edwards and David Nickerson reported this story as fellows for Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School in New York. Cascade Tuholske, a climate impact scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, contributed to the data analysis. Public Health Watch, an independent investigative nonprofit, helped edit this story.
This story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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