Luz Cruz had put on her long-sleeve shirt, covered her face with a bandanna and pulled down a sun hat before she headed out to work at dawn in the already sweltering vineyards of the Coachella Valley in California.
But on Thursday, as the temperature rose to 110 degrees, her head started to pound. She tried to focus on picking the 30 boxes of grapes she needed to earn her daily bonus, but soon she felt so tired that it was hard to stand.
By the time Cruz, 18, sat down, the temperature had reached 115 degrees and she was struggling to breathe.
“I’d never experienced anything like that. My head hurt and I was gasping,” she said. She felt better after she rested for a few hours. But the next day, she suffered heat stroke symptoms again.
By Saturday, she had decided this was just something she would have to tolerate this harvest season. Working through a record-breaking heat wave is the only way she has to help her parents make rent. “We really need the money,” she said. “I’m scared for the rest of the summer, but I also have no other option.”
[Severe heat and drought the hallmarks of a changing west]
The week of severe heat battering the West has been particularly devastating for people who work or live outside, with little chance to escape the sweltering temperatures. There’s little hope for true relief in sight as climate change makes the region hotter and drier. But at least most of the 50 million people under heat advisories can ride out the steamy temperatures inside.
Not so for construction workers in Las Vegas.
“It’s been pretty miserable,” Travis Hoskins, 35, said. “It was already 97 degrees when I got in my car this morning at 3 a.m. It feels like someone is trying to turn you into jerky.”
The company he works for, Summit Restoration, has invested in a machine that can make 300 pounds of ice a day and imposed a buddy system for workers in case someone begins to pass out. Hoskins also bought a personal neck fan. But he’s worried about how bad things might get by August.
“I’ve been in Vegas now for 18 years and I don’t remember it ever being this bad in June,” he said. “I was out the other day and I had to call my guys and say, ‘You have to stop.’ I was driving out to the site and the temperature reading went from 117 degrees to 121.” The men were happy to end work early, he said, and soaked each other with water guns in celebration.
Advocates are especially worried about the effects the prolonged heat might have on the homeless.
“Out of all the seasons, the summer is the most brutal,” said Monica Garcia, a homeless outreach worker in San Antonio, which is under a heat warning. “They’re drained. They’re tired. I’ve seen people who get dehydrated and get delusional.”
Still, Garcia said, the majority of homeless people she has encounters on the street during extreme heat will not come to a shelter.
In Sacramento, which reached 100 degrees and then kept getting hotter, Desiree Gavinson and her boyfriend are hoping to ride out the next few weeks in their car.
They found a place to rest on Saturday on the side street next to John Muir Children’s Park, which was deserted except for a man using the water fountain to wash himself. “If you keep moving your car, you can stay in shade most of the day,” Gavinson said.
The nights are harder. “It just doesn’t cool down,” she said. “We don’t sleep a lot until five, six in the morning — and then you get a few nice hours before the sun really starts to get you again.”
[Record-setting heat blasts the West: ‘Your skin is almost sizzling’]
In California, the heat is coinciding with the harvest season, and the next several months are forecast to be especially punishing. Farmworkers are 20 times more likely to die of illnesses related to heat stress than other workers, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Construction workers also risk dramatically elevated rates of heat deaths. Despite the risks, no federal heat regulation exists, so it’s up to each worker to decide what is safe.
But many people don’t want to take off work early. Vidal Mendoza, 53, lost three days of wages after his supervisor sent everyone home from the pepper fields because of the heat. Now he is weighing moving his family up to Northern California, where he believes the summer will be slightly cooler.
“I could have kept working this week. Your head hurts but only in a normal way,” he said. “If you don’t work, the rent and the bills are still there waiting.”
Manuela Ramirez, an organizer with Líderes Campesinas, a network of female farmworkers, spent Saturday passing out water bottles and pamphlets to farmworkers in Coachella. “The heat is just starting, and we’re already having workers passing out and going to the hospital,” she said. “It’s a huge sacrifice they’re making so that we can have produce.”
The pamphlet Ramirez was handing out featured drawings of a farmworker in a prone position, clutching his head in agony. “What can a person do for heat stroke? REST,” it said.
Mark Kreidler in Sacramento contributed to this report.
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Farmworkers and construction crews face special danger as an extreme heat wave continues to bake the West - The Washington Post
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