Page 34 - OHS, March 2022

SUMMER HAZARDS
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We often call heat stress a slow-moving injury in that it happens over a period of time, often without the sufferer being aware that they are in trouble. Heat illness is far more common than most people know, with eleven workers seriously injured or even dying from heat stress each and every day. This is particularly tragic given that it’s an injury that’s 100 percent preventable with the right preparation and knowledge.
While most workplaces know that they need to provide the big three—rest, shade and hydration—many don’t realize that those can fall short in especially hot, humid or heavy work conditions. It is crucial for your workers, your safety program and for your company’s bottom line to go beyond the basics to develop a comprehensive heat safety plan.
Monetary Costs
Those eleven daily injuries translate to thousands of people every year, and with an average price tag of $53,589 for each incident, it adds up to millions of dollars, not including any additional wrongful death lawsuits that may be filed or other judgements that may be leveled against your company. Those are the monetary costs, which are significant. But there are other, even more serious costs as well.
Costs to Worker Health & Well-Being
It is easy to think of heat stress as causing cramps, vomiting and even fainting. However, a severe heat illness like heat stroke can forever change or end a person’s life.
Organ Damage. If your body temperature gets high enough to cause a heat stroke, important systems begin to suffer irreparable damage. That can mean brain damage, heart, liver or kidney damage, or even compromised muscle tissue. Organs can swell to the point of injury or be damaged enough to require
dialysis or a kidney transplant. It doesn’t happen only to those with underlying conditions, it can happen to healthy workers too. Compromised Heat Tolerance. Heat Tolerance is the amount of heat your body can endure without becoming ill—including how much time you can spend in the heat. Many heat stroke survivors find that their body overheats faster than it did before their illness. Their body may not be able to sweat as efficiently, hampering its ability to cool down in hot conditions and they show signs of heat illness sooner and in cooler temperatures than before. This may mean they need to drop out of the labor
workforce entirely.
Time-Sensitive Damage. When someone suffers a heat
stroke, you have just 30 minutes to prevent long-term damage, making it crucial to bring their body temperature down as quickly as possible. Practice with your teams, assigning someone to call 911 while others implement emergency cooling procedures.
Soft Costs in Productivity & Poor Performance
The Atlantic Council’s Washington D.C.-based Adrienne Arsht- Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center estimates that the United States could lose approximately $100 billion a year in productivity due to heat. They predict that number could double by 2030 and may reach as high as $500 billion by 2050. At a 2021 Webinar discussing the many facets of working in the heat,1 Chris Valetta Co-Founder and President of cooling textile manufacturer MISSION explained that many pro-athletes are beginning to understand the effect that body temperature has on performance. According to Valetta, research groups like the Korey Stringer Institute have found that “if you keep yourself cooler, not only are you safer, but you have a significant performance improvement.” A report by Bongers, et. al. in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that cooling before and during exertion enhanced performance by about six percent. So how much poorer is performance if you neglect cooling during exertion?
This concept is applicable to the industrial realm as we ask our workers to do their jobs in hotter conditions. You may not just have workers out sick due to heat illness or workers out permanently after becoming disabled. You almost certainly also have healthy workers who may be coping in the heat but who are working more slowly and less efficiently because they are overheated. While all of these consequences are dire, the good news is that none of them has to happen.
Steps to Help Prevent Heat Illness on the Job
The National Heat Safety Coalition (NHSC)2 was founded by experts in heat stress, cooling textiles and industrial safety. Recently, a group sponsored by the NHSC developed a consensus document3 outlining five simple steps to keep workers safe in hot working conditions.
Heat Hygiene. Heat hygiene can take many different forms, from providing wellness assessments for your workers to inform them about their own particular risk factors, to simply educating
30 Occupational Health & Safety | MARCH 2022
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