In California’s Interior, There’s No Escape From the Desperate Heat
by Maanvil Singh
July 10, 2021
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... -heat-race
Extract:
(The Guardian) While coastal regions, including the Bay Area, will have been spared by cool marine air, California’s Central Valley – the state’s sprawling, agricultural innards – will have broiled.
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Hotter, drier conditions also mean harder, and less work for the region’s hundreds of thousands of farm workers. This week, Jesús Zúñiga has been up at 3am, to get to the fields by 5am. “I pick tomatoes – which is one of the toughest jobs out here,” he said, showing off the thick calluses that have developed on his hands. For hours each day, the harsh valley sun bears down on his back as he hunches over the tomato vines. Once he’s collected 50 pounds of fruit, he sprints down the neat, irrigated rows, to dump buckets full of the fruit on to trucks. His harvest ends up in grocery stores as well as fast food restaurant chains.
On several days this week, temperatures reached dangerous highs by 10am. “So on these hot days we’re only able to work five or six hours, before we’d start to get sick,” he said. “But then, we only get paid for five or six hours.” At $14 an hour that isn’t enough to pay his rent and soaring electricity bills, or to support his family of five.
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Farm workers die of heat at roughly 20 times the national rate, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But as the climate crisis triggers longer, hotter heatwaves, the risks for agricultural workers will rise, said Michelle Tigchelaar, a researcher at Stanford University. Based on climate models projecting a global temperature increase of 3.6F (2C) by 2050, Tigchelaar discovered that agricultural workers who currently labor through an average of 21 dangerously hot days a year will see that number nearly double over the next few decades.
In some parts of the Central Valley, the heat index through most of the summer will surpass what even healthy, young and well-hydrated workers could safely handle, according to the study, published last year. “These are the hidden costs of keeping our supermarkets and shops well-stocked,” she said.
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