The 63-year-old letter carrier had slipped on a patch of wet leaves and broken her ankle in March, and she spent the spring at home in a walking boot. Although the injury still bothered her, Frank had been cleared to go back to work. She was just two years away from retirement when she climbed back into her U.S. Postal Service truck on July 6, 2018.
The temperature had topped out in the high 80s in the first days of the month, but then it shot up dramatically after the July 4 holiday, putting Southern California under an extreme heat advisory. On July 5, the highs surpassed 100 degrees.
Frank’s sister, Lynn Calkins, had warned her to be safe as she prepared for her first day back. “I said, ‘You’re not used to it. Just be careful,’” Calkins recalled.
The two shared a townhouse in the North Hills neighborhood, and Calkins always made sure the ice trays were filled the evening before a hot day so Frank could load up her water jug before heading out at 7:30 a.m.
Getting an early start on her Woodland Hills route only helped so much ― it was closing in on 100 degrees in downtown Los Angeles by late morning. By the afternoon, the weather stations in nearby Burbank and Van Nuys, in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, hit 114 and 117, respectively ― the hottest temperatures ever recorded there.
Frank would have found no respite in her mail truck. Most of the Postal Service fleet is roughly three decades old and not equipped with air conditioning. The only relief is a pair of open windows and a small fan attached to the dashboard.
Frank struggled to keep pace. About 2 p.m., she called her supervisor to say she was falling behind and might not finish on time ― standard practice for a letter carrier who’s lagging, since managers want to avoid running into overtime.
The post office dispatched another employee to meet Frank on her route and give her a hand.
When her colleague reached her, Frank was unconscious in the driver’s seat. Paramedics recorded her death at 3:35 p.m.
‘Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor Heat’
Working for the Postal Service can be a surprisingly dangerous job. While back sprains and dog bites are common for letter carriers, some of the greatest hazards are encapsulated in the agency’s unofficial motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
An analysis of records shows the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued more than $1.3 million in initial fines against the Postal Service for heat hazards in eight years ― a large sum by OSHA standards. In many cases, the Postal Service managed to negotiate those fines down to a few thousand dollars each, or even to nothing at all, by agreeing to address the hazards.
But the continued accumulation of big-ticket citations for repeat violations shows the Postal Service hasn’t fixed its problem. OSHA files share common themes: carriers toiling inside hot vehicles, feeling pressured to complete their routes on time, and returning to work in dangerously hot weather without being acclimatized. They also show postal officials pointing to the agency’s troubled finances in pleas to reduce fines while working to limit the legal scope of agreements to protect employees.
After Missouri letter carrier John Watzlawick died of hyperthermia in 2012, OSHA cited the Postal Service for willfully violating safety law and issued a fine of $70,000. The Postal Service agreed to implement new safeguards in 2014 to settle the case, but Watzlawick’s widow, Kay, has watched with dismay as the citations have continued.
“I want something done,” she told HuffPost.
An analysis by the Center for Public Integrity last year found that the Postal Service had exposed about 900 workers to heat hazards since 2012, leading to muscle cramps, vomiting and loss of consciousness. Close to 100 workers had been hospitalized for heat-related illnesses since 2015, the site reported. Because the hospitalizations are self-reported by employers, the full tally over that span is likely higher and wouldn’t reflect the times when workers got sick but didn’t end up in the hospital.
Of at least four carriers whose deaths since 2012 involved heat, three had recently returned to work from a long absence. Occupational health experts say it’s critical that workers who have been off the job are eased back into their roles over the course of several days so that their bodies have time to readjust to high temperatures.
Debbie Berkowitz, who worked as a chief of staff and senior adviser at OSHA and is now a safety expert at the National Employment Law Project, said these large penalties are rare. “These are fines given to companies where OSHA has really solid evidence that they knew about the hazard and they still haven’t abated the conditions,” said Berkowitz. “I think getting the mail to customers is such a big priority that they have overlooked protecting their workers ― and overlooked it repeatedly.”
The Postal Service’s sprawling workforce includes about 340,000 letter carriers, and whatever the weather may bring, Americans expect their mail six days a week. Though the agency declined to make an official available for an interview on the subject, a spokesperson said the USPS formalized a heat illness prevention program in 2018, drawing on protocols that were already in place, and that employee safety is a “top priority.” In regular meetings, workers are reminded to stay hydrated, wear cool clothing, find shade if necessary and call 911 if they start to experience heat exhaustion or heat stroke.
The spokesperson said supervisors provide mandatory training on the signs of heat illness and make sure workers “have the resources needed to do their jobs safely.”
But the challenges will only become greater as heat records continue to be broken due to global warming. The Los Angeles Daily News, which covered Frank’s death closely, reported that another carrier from the same post office was hospitalized for heat illness a year ago, on a day when the temperature hit 100.
Climate Change Is Making Hot Days Hotter
Postal workers make for a disturbing case study in the evolving dangers of outdoor work. Anyone who does a physical job exposed to the elements will face greater hazards as the climate changes. And many workers, such as roofers, farmworkers and landscapers, are doing strenuous jobs without the union protections that postal employees have, making them more reluctant to speak up.
“As a rule of thumb, if we fail to act to reduce carbon emissions, then by midcentury a typical summer day will be as hot as the hottest single day of summer is today,” said Michael Mann, a climatologist who directs the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
“And the hottest day of summer? There is simply no analog in the past for what that will look like.”
BELOW: The number of extremely hot days each summer will increase significantly due to global warming.
In some respects, that disturbing future has already arrived. The year 2019 was the second-hottest in 140 years of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records, falling behind only 2016. So far, 2020 is shaping up to be even more sweltering than last year. Based on temperature data through May, the NOAA says this year is “virtually certain” to crack the top five and stands a nearly 50% chance of being the hottest ever.
At HuffPost’s request, Michelle Tigchelaar, a climate scientist at Stanford University, analyzed how much more vulnerable letter carriers will be to extreme heat as global warming worsens. Factoring in clothing, work pace and access to shade, Tigchelaar’s data assumes a day in which the heat index hits 94.5 degrees Fahrenheit constitutes a danger to carriers. Her findings show that workers would face far more unsafe working days under an increase of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), let alone 4 degrees (7.2 F).
The new working environment will be much worse in the South and Midwest. For instance, a letter carrier in Detroit now faces about 10 days a year in which the heat index hits 94.5. But under a 3.6-degree F increase, that jumps to 43 days a year. Under a 7.2-degree increase, it shoots up to 79 days a year. In places like Miami, Phoenix and Houston, more than one out of every three days each year would pose a heat hazard.
There are several ways outdoor workers can mitigate heat ― working at a slower pace, taking frequent breaks, having access to air conditioning. Most of them come with a loss of productivity or some other expense. Employers will have to shift schedules around, keeping workers indoors during the hottest hours. For postal employees, that could mean delivering parcels after dark, raising other safety concerns.
And unlike, say, agricultural work, which will shift geographically as the climate changes, parcels will still need to be delivered in the most oppressively hot regions. Even though there will be fewer heat waves in mild climates like Seattle, the workers in those areas will be less physiologically prepared when the temperature does soar.
Keeping all workers safe in heat can be tricky because everybody’s resilience is different. Some workers can tolerate much more than others. For someone like Peggy Frank, there was no knowing where her limit was until she passed it.
BELOW: Letter carriers will face far more unsafe working days due to extreme heat as global warming worsens. A sampling of major cities:
Grumman Postal Vehicles ‘An Easy Bake Oven On Wheels’
When Grumman produced the bulk of the current fleet of postal vehicles, they had a life expectancy of 24 years. That was about 30 years ago. The “long life vehicle,” as it’s known, lacks newer equipment, such as anti-lock brakes. And breakdowns have become a growing problem. The trucks are so old that several dozen catch fire every year, as Vice recently reported.
But as any carrier in warmer climes knows, the trucks can get hot even without the engine combusting.
“It’s a little Easy-Bake Oven on wheels,” said Richard Salinas, who delivered mail in Texas for 35 years before retiring this year. “You’re sitting right behind the engine block, and there’s no firewall. All the engine heat comes into the cab. As far as the floor is concerned, it’s a rubber mat. All the radiant heat from the street comes in there.”
Photos an Arizona letter carrier took last year purportedly showed a steak in a plastic bag slowly cooking on a mail truck’s dash to 142 degrees ― what a chef might consider “medium” these days. Such anecdotes do not seem far-fetched to Barb Larson, who retired from the Postal Service in Colorado last April. Larson chose to hang it up in the springtime to avoid one last summer, despite her area’s comparatively mild weather.
“I’ve put thermometers on the floorboards and it’s 135 degrees on the floor,” she said. “I can’t even imagine Phoenix or Florida or Texas.”
The Postal Service has been punting the procurement process for new delivery trucks while it’s strapped for cash. It has been racking up heavy losses for years, mostly due to a unique and onerous mandate from Congress that it pre-fund retiree health benefits years in advance ― a requirement no other agency is held to.
The steep drop in first-class mail due to the internet hasn’t helped ― nor has the coronavirus pandemic. When the economic slowdown hit, the agency said it expected to lose $2 billion per month. The damage hasn’t been as bad as feared, however, thanks to a boom in package delivery as homebound Americans shop more online.
The agency has not released details on its next batch of vehicles, but it is soliciting proposals now and hopes to award contracts by the end of this year. Even so, many carriers don’t expect air conditioning in the new trucks. The job requires constantly opening and closing windows and doors, a waste of cool air that the Postal Service may view as too costly.
