"Texas workers keep dying in the heat"

Eighteen-year-old Danny Nolasco spent the day of July 15, 2024, mixing and hauling buckets of cement at a construction site in stifling heat.

…away from the small mountain town in Honduras where Nolasco grew up…

…started work at 9 a.m. and plowed through the day, breaking only once, for lunch. By the afternoon the temperature had reached 99 degrees, with a heat index of 104.

Shortly after 6 p.m., Nolasco collapsed…He died on the scene...

...U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration investigators, who look for underlying causes of workplace casualties that might otherwise go unnoticed, classified the fatality as a heat death. They found that Nolasco’s employer did not sufficiently prepare him to work in high heat.

Carlos Cruz Construction, the company he was working for that day, declined to comment for this story...

…Rolando Varela Gómez. He first settled in Wisconsin when he came to the United States from Nicaragua…But he struggled to find work and headed to Houston, where he’d heard that companies were hiring…

…joined a crew building a water treatment plant near the small town of Beasley, outside Houston. He had been working in Texas for only two weeks when he died on Aug. 21, 2024. His relative said that coming from “freezing” Wisconsin, he wasn’t used to the Texas heat...