The extreme-heat death of an Oregon farmworker and hundreds of others in late June could have been avoided. Climate negligence and lagging worker protections are killing people.
What happens to your body when it is exposed to extreme heat is not pretty. The road to heatstroke looks like this: As soon as you step outside on a hot day, your blood grows warmer, heated by the sun’s radiation and your own rising metabolism. Keeping your body temperature at 98.6 F – the happy place for humans – now requires work. Receptors in your brain start telling your circulatory system to push more blood toward your skin, where the heat can be dissipated.
At a body temperature of 105 F to 106 F, your limbs are convulsed by seizures. From 107 to 109 F, you vomit and your sphincter releases. At 110 to 111 F, your cells themselves literally begin to break down or “denature.” Cell membranes — the thin lipid walls that protect the inner workings of your cells — literally melt. The millions of tiny tubes in your kidneys that filter your blood are cooked. Muscle tissues disintegrate.
Other manifestations of extreme heat are less obvious. The jet stream, for example. For nearly all of human history nobody had any idea there was a river of wind flowing high above the northern hemisphere. Then B-29 pilots during World War II noticed that bombs dropped from a high altitudebefore hitting the ground.
Perez’s nephew Pedro Lucas had made the trip to the U.S. a decade earlier. It had been a hard crossing — 16 days in the Chihuahuan desert, where he fell and broke his knee and was eating plant roots to survive — but he made it. Lucas found a good job at a nursery in Oregon, paying $14 an hour. Lucas’s father, brother, and cousin all followed and found work in the Willamette Valley. It was not an easy life, but it was better than the $6 a day you could earn on a farm in Guatemala..