Pilita Clark
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A few days ago, Amazon posted a message on Twitter that you don’t always hear from a global retail giant. Part of his downtown Seattle headquarters, he said, was functioning as an official city “cooling site” for “residents who needed a place to stay safe from excessive heat.”
This was just one of dozens of cooling centers that authorities hastily mapped across the city when an inconceivable heat wave engulfed the Pacific Northwest, a region best known for its low temperatures and drizzle.
In Canada, where recorded temperatures had never exceeded 45 ° C, the thermometer soared to 49.6 ° C – temperatures normally seen in the Middle East – in the village of Lytton in British Columbia, just before a wildfire will force residents to evacuate.
“Words cannot describe this historic event,” tweeted meteorologists from the Department of the Environment in western Canada, where authorities fear the heat may be linked to hundreds of sudden deaths.
The United Nations World Meteorological Organization said grimly: “So many records have been broken that it is difficult to keep track.” Amazon was in a good position to help. “There was a slow but steady flow of people” to their cooling site, a spokesperson told me later in the week. But the company also sent hot paid warehouse workers home Monday afternoon, and it wasn’t the only one to do so.
Across the region, businesses closed early and workers left work. In Oregon, a farm worker died while working in the scorching heat. We normally expect to see scenes like these in countries like India, which could soon become one of the first places in the world with heat waves capable of killing a healthy person resting in the shade, McKinsey reported last year.
But it has been a different story for workers and their bosses in places like North America. “I think the heat wave was a wake-up call for many Western countries,” says Andreas Flouris, a world expert on heat stress in the workplace who runs a research laboratory in Greece.
As global warming exacerbates the chances of workers experiencing heat stress, he is at the forefront of efforts to introduce new laws and regulations to combat the problem.
At the moment, many guidelines about when it’s too hot to work are rarely enforced or too weak to ensure workers are protected. Flouris says this is starting to change.
Qatar adopted a series of new work rules to deal with hot temperatures in May after it hired Flouris’s lab to study manual workers in the Gulf State, which has come under fire for its treatment of migrant workers who they are building stadiums for next year’s soccer World Cup.
The new measures mean that the periods in which it is prohibited to work outdoors in summer have been extended. And all work must be finished once the temperature of the wet bulb balloon (TGBH) – a function of both air temperature and relative humidity – exceeds 32.1 ° C.
Workers must undergo annual health checks and employers must develop risk assessments that are critical to understanding heat stress issues that Flouris says are easy to miss.
“One size doesn’t fit all,” he says, explaining that he uses tiny pill-size monitoring devices that workers swallow to measure core body temperature.
In a restaurant, a waiter may have a normal temperature throughout the day, while a chef in the same building may have “extreme levels of hyperthermia.”
Greece is testing similar measures that it expects to take effect next year and this trend is gathering momentum elsewhere. The trick is to find a balance between protecting workers and keeping businesses open, Flouris says.
What was surprising about seeing the reports of the Pacific Northwest heat wave was how eerily familiar it felt. A doctor told the Seattle Times that the number of people admitted to the hospital with heat stroke and other heat-related problems was very similar to what he saw at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Climate change means that the disaster of recent days will by no means be the last of its kind. As Flouris says, “this will be something that will happen much more frequently in the coming years.”
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