Michael Karl McNeil

Heat illness: California has two standards, and most employers have one

Every construction and agricultural employer I meet has an outdoor heat illness plan. A great many of them believe that plan covers the warehouse, the shop floor and the kitchen. It does not.

Outdoor and indoor are separate rules

8 CCR section 3395 is the outdoor standard and has been in force for years: shade, water, cool-down rests, acclimatisation, training, emergency response, and high-heat procedures at 95 degrees Fahrenheit for certain industries.

8 CCR section 3396, Heat Illness Prevention in Indoor Places of Employment, is the newer one. It applies where the indoor temperature reaches 82 degrees Fahrenheit and employees are present. At 87 degrees — or a heat index of 87, or at 82 degrees where employees wear heat-restrictive clothing or work in high radiant heat — the full requirements engage: control measures, a cool-down area, and a written plan.

The exemptions, precisely

  • Telework at a location the employer does not control
  • Incidental exposure of less than fifteen minutes in any sixty-minute period between 82 and 95 degrees — which does not cover vehicles without effective air conditioning, or shipping containers
  • Emergency operations
  • Government-operated detention facilities under specified conditions

The vehicle and container carve-out from the incidental-exposure exemption is the one that catches distribution and logistics employers. A driver in and out of a hot trailer all afternoon is not incidentally exposed.

What a workable plan looks like

Measure. Not once, in April, at nine in the morning — measure through a hot week, at the working locations, at the height people work, with the doors as they actually are. Record it. Most indoor sites have two or three zones that behave completely differently from the rest of the building, and those zones are the plan.

Then write the plan around what supervision can actually do on the day: who watches, what triggers a cool-down, where the cool-down area is, who calls for help and how. A heat plan that requires someone to read a wet bulb globe temperature chart in the middle of a shift will not be followed, and a plan that is not followed is worse than none — it documents what the employer knew.

Michael Karl McNeil, registered industrial hygiene professional.