Factory workers and labourers call for furlough as heat becomes too intense to work in

[...] Olmastroni is one of five people in Italy whose death over the past week is believed to have been provoked by the extreme heat as a more intense anticyclone, Caronte, broke a temperature record in Rome and nudged the mercury to almost 47C in Sicily. The true death toll is likely to be far greater.

All, apart from a 44-year-old road worker who died after collapsing while preparing fresh markings on a street in Milan and whose family is still awaiting the results of an autopsy, had heart-related health issues.

They include Ciro Adinolfi, 75, originally from Afragola near Naples, who died in front of his son, also a labourer, while operating a crane on the construction site of an Amazon warehouse in Jesi, in the central Marche region, and Gabriele Lucido, 64, from Salerno in the south, who was found dead in his lodgings after finishing his shift at a construction site in Brescia for TAV, the Italy-France high speed rail project.

Olindo Zuanon, a baker, collapsed in front of his wife in their shop in a town near Treviso, on Monday and later died in hospital. Doctors said the 63-year-old had a body temperature close to 42C.

Factory workers and outside labourers across Italy threatened to go on strike and unions called for furloughs to be activated as temperatures became too intense to work in.

“Staff should be given paid leave when the temperature exceeds 35C,” said Salvatore Cutaia, secretary general of the Milan unit of the FenealUil workers. “They also shouldn’t have to work during the hottest hours, while shaded areas should be created where they can take breaks and water provided – these small precautions can save lives.”

There are several ways somebody can die from heat. In some cases, heatstroke kills them outright because the body is too hot for its organs to work. Others die from dehydration as the body sweats to keep itself cool. For many people, particularly those with heart and lung disease, faster blood flow leads to cardio-vascular failure.

“Pre-existing conditions can make people more vulnerable to hot temperatures,” said Sonia Seneviratne, a climate scientist at ETH Zürich who has researched heatwave deaths. “Higher mortality is in particular observed in persons who are older than 65 years old.”

But young and healthy people can also die during hot conditions, she added, particularly “in cases of high physical exertion, often combined with equipment or clothing impeding heat loss”. [...]

Heatwaves have grown stronger as people have warped the climate and raised global temperatures. A study co-authored by Seneviratne in July found that 60% of the heatwave deaths in Switzerland last summer could be attributed to the climate crisis.

“The burning of fossil fuels has substantially contributed to the increased occurrence of heatwaves across the globe,” said Seneviratne. “Some recent hot extreme events were so extreme that they had a near zero probability of having occurred without human emissions.”