Excessive heat | Rising Heat Means More Vigilance in Keeping Workers Safe | Jenny’s son died afte…

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Excessive heat

Why it matters: A suite of new analyses has found that regulations that provide basic safeguards like water, shade and rest for workers in hot conditions can help lower the numbers of heat-driven injuries, workers' compensation claims and even deaths.

How have regulations helped? The most recent study, published in December in the journal Health Affairs, looked at California's rule protecting outdoor workers from heat, the oldest such rule in the country. Researchers found the regulations led to at least a 33% drop in heat-related deaths among workers after 2010 — an estimate of several dozen lives saved each year.

Read on … to learn more about the ways the government can protect workers.

Rising Heat Means More Vigilance in Keeping Workers Safe

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Extreme heat is on the rise in the United States, challenging the ability of many industries and  employers to keep workers safe, especially in high risk industries with considerable amounts of outdoor work, such as construction.

While we can expect unabated climate change to continue to pose a threat, we do have a playbook to mitigate these risks. Devoting the resources to create a plan, and more importantly, implementing the plan, can quite literally save lives on the jobsite.

Jenny's son died after working in extreme heat. She believes a policy could have saved him

Jenny Newport's son, Glenn, died 13 years ago from working in extreme heat. She believes a heat policy could have saved him.  (ABC News: Crystalyn Brown)

Jenny Newport's son, Glenn, died while working on a coal seam gas pipeline construction project.

Temperatures at the construction site where he was working had exceeded 40 degrees Celsius that day.

Ms Newport is calling for state and federal governments to implement heat policies to help protect workers.

It has been 13 years since Jenny Newport's son died from extreme heat while on a worksite in Queensland, and she believes not much has changed.

Ms Newport had hoped there would be an effective heat policy for every worksite across the state after her son's death.

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