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Before the Biden administration can respond to the latest petition, they need more information.
“We have a lot of work to do,” McCarthy said.
Access to air conditioning is only one area of focus, she noted. Places where people rarely needed to cool off in the summer now do. But there is no national inventory of air conditioning units. McCarthy said the federal government needs to leverage its public housing and subsidy programs to expand access for low-income people, precisely the type of people who are not relieved of the heat on the job.
Indeed, one of the main factors influencing heat stress is whether people can cool down overnight to recover after working at high temperatures during the day. Thousands of workers who don’t have access to air conditioning or can’t afford to pay for cooling are probably already at a higher risk of heat stress when they start their shifts. This is something the National Weather Service, which issues heat advisories, has never been able to explain.
“People will not be able, at some point, to live without the air conditioning that allows them to survive in the kind of extreme temperatures that we face,” said McCarthy.
Cities often “are not well observed,” said Hunter Jones, climate and health project manager at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. More monitors – like portable sensors – would help gauge heat levels in urban areas, where it can often get hotter due to the amount of concrete and other impervious surfaces.
The National Weather Service monitors temperature and humidity to notify its heat stress alert system. But they don’t collect other types of data that could protect workers outdoors, such as the intensity of solar radiation over the course of a day. Instead, the service’s heat index is designed to determine what the temperature looks like in the shade.
The agency has no way of predicting a more comprehensive measurement called the Wet Bulb Globe Temperature. NIOSH recommends that employers use this measurement – which takes into account temperature, humidity, wind speed, angle of the sun, and cloud cover – to assess potential heat stress.
This measure is also used by military and sports teams to protect soldiers and athletes from heat. The state of Minnesota standard for indoor workers is the only one that uses the wet bulb globe temperature. California and Washington rely on the heat index for thermal protection of outside workers.
Wet Bulb Globe temperature monitors can also be prohibitively expensive for employers, especially in industries where people work at multiple sites, NOAA’s Jones said. For this reason, he said, the National Weather Service is trying to develop more products to measure it.
Existing wet bulb globe temperature forecasting methods may not provide a fully accurate picture of heat stress in local environments. NOAA has noted that using a process known as “mesh forecasts” to produce estimates of wet globe temperature in separate spatial areas still fails to detect local temperature changes.
That’s why Jones stressed that new technologies such as wearable sensors, especially for hard-to-track indoor conditions, are especially important.
“The indoor environment is difficult because there is so much that could be at stake there,” he said.
The design of buildings is also essential and can affect indoor temperatures even a few days after the highest temperatures drop, said Brian Vant-Hull, a researcher at the City College of New York. The materials with which buildings are constructed, the number of windows present and the level of energy that machines produce during operation influence thermal infrared radiation and heat retention. This means that heat stress conditions may be present indoors even a few days after the most recent advisory.
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