Inside a Successful Heat Safety Program

François Haman, PhD | Thermal Biology Scientist | Full-Time Professor Faculty of Health Sciences University of Ottawa

Ryan Hoover | Manager of Corporate Safety | Arizona Public Service Company (APS)

Dr. Kevin Rindal | Vimocity

Hello, and welcome to this month's live event.

Today, we're going to be talking about heat related illnesses as they remain one of the biggest seasonal risks for utility and construction crews. And for outdoor crews, working in the heat is unavoidable. But we can implement controls and provide training and resources that help these folks reduce their risks. So today's conversation is designed to give you a clearer understanding of how heat affects work performance along with practical ideas from a leading Arizona utility for improving heat safety controls and crew awareness.

Before we get started, I just want to remind everyone that today's session will be recorded, so make sure to drop any questions in the chat and stay tuned for free resources at the end. My name is Doctor. Kevin Rindal. I'm the CEO and founder of Vimocity.

And for those unfamiliar with Vimocity, we offer a platform that helps safety and ops teams keep crews ready for the work and prevent common injuries by delivering expert made safety content to workers across all the places they work.

I'm really excited to be joined today by two different experts in this space. First, Ryan Hoover from Arizona Public Service Company and then Francois Haman from the University of Ottawa. So Ryan, can we start with you? And love it if you could introduce, yourself to the audience.

Well, first, thanks for having me, Kevin. Yes. My name is Ryan Hoover. I am the manager of corporate safety for Arizona Public Service Company.

So, we're relatively medium sized utility company but primarily in Arizona, a little bit in New Mexico, power generation. I've worked in utility space for eighteen years now but I didn't come up as a safety professional.

I actually came up in the field as a fleet mechanic for all of our heavy duty equipment that we have at APS. So I spent ten years as a craft worker in the trades, And then I got into leadership and was actually running some operations groups both in transportation department and then I also had an operations and maintenance for T and D running some field crews and trouble men. So, I've gotta see both ends of the the spectrum on, you know, seeing it from the worker actually doing the work and the challenges and then also the leader that is, you know, in charge of running a group and meeting all the deadlines, competing priorities, and creating the culture for the people working under them.

So that's something I wanted to bring in to safety. I was like, if I had a a slogan if I was running for office for it, it was like bringing common sense back to safety. And I just had, like, a very practical approach on translating, like, what we know are best practices and keeping workers safe into terms that our field workers can understand, buy into, and the same with the field supervisors as well knowing that, you know, they have a major effect on those individuals. So how do I kinda bridge this field, perspective with, you know, the new age safety?

So, I've been in my role for over four years now. We have kind of governance for the safety for the whole company and as well as some cultural groups and on the human organizational performance department as well. So some of my answers are gonna be a little skewed with that lens, and that's why. But that's a little bit about me.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Ryan. We're excited to have you be a part of this conversation. Francois, can I pass it over to you?

Yeah. Thanks a lot, Kevin. Always excited to be here. I love these live events because they really bring the science, down to the field. So I am a scientist.

I'm a professor at University of Ottawa, I've been a thermal physiologist for about the last twenty five years.

I worked quite a bit with the effects of heat and cold on health, safety, performance. Performance has been my big go to recently is linking the two aspects of improving health, but also making sure that we can still perform the work that we need to do.

I work with natives in Northern Canada for many years. I have a lot of field experience being out there, especially in cold conditions, but I've also done a lot of work with the military in different countries around NATO and both in heat and cold. I've worked on PPE, so I've worked on equipment from the bomb suit to the other tactical vests and looking at how to allow soldiers to perform to their maximum without increasing the risk of injuries. So all of this is tremendously important for me. I'm always excited to have somebody from the field talking about their experiences and seeing how science improve these conditions and how we can bring these two things together from the science to the fieldwork.

Yeah. I'm really looking forward to this, and I'll give a shout out to Francois. He and I just talked about this for about an hour and a half on the Work Ready podcast. And so there's definitely more information available. This is gonna be about a thirty minute conversation today, but let's go ahead and jump in. So Francois, when most people hear the term heat stress, they simply think about it being hot outside, but there are all these different factors that impact heat on a person's body. So what's actually happening inside the body physiologically when they're exposed to heat?

Yeah. So it is complex because we tend to just take our phones, look at the weather channel. We look at the temperature.

Some people forget about the humidity. We can bring that up a bit, later on if you want because humidity does have a tremendous impact, on our bodies because we are losing heat using evaporation quite a bit. So I'll come back to this concept, but it's not just about the external weather. It's also about what you're doing.

And so if I'm physically active, this is all part of the actual heat burden that you're accumulating. If I'm moving if I'm resting versus working tremendously hard, the impact's gonna be very different and it's gonna be added to whatever temperature you're gonna be facing. When it comes to PPE, these things are essential. So having the right clothing, making sure that you're not getting injured under various conditions is tremendously important, but they also any type of exoskeleton that you put around you to protect you from the conditions increase that heat burden.

So it's all these things that come together that will result in your heat stress and how the body is gonna be responding to it and trying to defend and reduce that temperature. And what you need to remember is the body is trying to bring that core temperature down. On the heat side, we have no room to maneuver. If we start overheating, we will start having effects on our proteins, on the functioning of their systems, and the systems will start shutting down one after the other.

And this is when you get in huge trouble. And there's all kinds of predation to this, and we'll talk about it slightly. But it's something that we need to remember is that it's the combination of all these things. And one thing I always like to to tell people, even though we don't have to become scientists to go in these conditions, there's still a few things that we should understand well.

And what some of these things related to heat and cold is the actual processes of heat transfer. So the heat can be transferred in many ways. It can be conduction, so touching the object directly, which could be hotter than you, which means you're getting the heat from that object.

It could be coming from radiation. So again, radiation of the sun, but any structure, and we all know this, and I'm sure in Arizona is very common. As you warm up the the rock face, if you're anywhere close to any warm pole or any warm conditions, vehicles, whatever is warm around you, you'll be getting heat from that from that structure. And that's through radiation. The sun is the most obvious one because the sun can transfer tremendous amounts of heat.

And then the other component is the actual evaporation. So for us humans, we're experts at evaporation. Anything that prevents us from evaporating will add to the burden.

So this evaporation is key. And as we talk about hydration, we're gonna realize that this is like, Kevin likes to say, an open system.

We got to bring water in to be able to evaporate. If we're not bringing water in, we're gonna stop evaporating and we're just not cooling down.

And then the final process, so out of the four, we have conduction, radiation, evaporation, and the last one is convection. I always like to keep it at the end because hopefully there's wind. Wind will allow you to actually maintain your temperature, but will also increase the rate of water loss and all these things. It will cool you, but it also comes with an additional burden. So when we put all of this together, heat stress and how the body responds is a combination of all these factors.

Thanks for sharing that, initial framework.

And earlier this year, we talked about cold safety. And Francois, you're gracious enough to come back on and share this. But those four factors that you just talked about in the cold or the heat also affect us in the same way in the cold.

And so, one of the things that you shared with our audience when we were talking about cold is this framework of green, yellow, orange, and red zones. And a big part of that is understanding, those warning signs at the earliest stages so that hopefully you never even get close to orange or the red zones. Can you walk us through that framework and then also share how people might be able to communicate that information to the frontline workers so that there's more self awareness on their part in terms of understanding how to proactively manage that heat.

Yeah. And some of that work actually came, from NATO work that I did, and we're trying to there are tremendous individual differences, and I'm sure Ryan can find tons of these individual differences, which is the people that he that he works with. But the reality of it is how do you take a single solution and apply it to every single person? It's one size fits none. You end up in a situation where you need to create something that the person can monitor themselves and be able to if there's any worry worries to be able to to address them. So so I think this is where these zones come in because every single human being will go through these zones.

When you deal with the green zone, I could be in very warm conditions, but I'm making all the right decisions, and I'm not that affected by the heat. Again and we'll talk about what we need to do to be able to face these these conditions. But, essentially, I'm in a situation where the heat is tremendous. I'm facing very difficult conditions, but all the right decisions make it that my body is responding exactly the way it's supposed to be responding.

When I get into the yellow zone, I start having mild effects of heat. You know, I can start being dizzy. I can feel very, very thirsty. I'm sweating profusely.

And all these things accumulate to be able to tell you, okay. Now I'm being affected by heat. Now my stopwatch is starting. And most often, people will ignore these things and not talk about them.

And one thing, again, that's very important for me is to change a culture that this is health and safety, and you need to discuss these things for sure. If you ignore these signs, you end up in the orange zone, which is heat exhaustion.

Then I start affecting my physical capacity, my mental capacity, my capacity to face this environment, and I started making mistakes.

I it can put me in a situation that if I don't do anything to bring it back towards the yellow or the green zone, that I will end up in the red zone. And the red zone is the one we don't wanna go into because this is an emergency.

This is basically the body's I haven't gone too far. I'm facing conditions, and I've not dealt with them. And now if I don't get external help to deal with it, I might die or I might get tremendously injured. So this is, again, the zones that I like to use. And I always say that these zones are not just about you telling other people, but it's also about the team.

And the team working together, understanding where everybody is will be the difference between people getting injured and people not getting injured and performing and doing your job to your best.

Ryan, you operate in Arizona. It is one of the most extreme, environments on at least in North America. And so you've put, different controls in place to help, people be safe on the job. Can you walk us through some of the forward thinking things that APS has done to prevent the workforce?

Yeah. Well, we get a lot of practice. So, a hundred and forty years of, safely delivering power to Arizona, I mean, wouldn't be successful if we didn't have some long bedded work practices in place.

For some context, like, my dad was a lineman when I was growing up. So, I used to hear the stories of him about what they would deal with with in regards to heat and how they got acclimated. But at that time, some of the vehicles didn't have air conditioners. We can imagine now in, like, today's thought process thinking of not even having, like, a place to cool off in an event.

But our workforce, they've had a lot of experience with us over a lot of years. So there's a lot of tribal stuff that gets passed down through generation of workers. Right? And how to individually prepare or from a company, how do we create an environment where people feel safe to work and operate and be able to monitor their body accordingly?

Because as Francois just lined out, it looks a little different for every person. So number one is creating, like, a safety culture and having that psychological safety where people know that production is not as valuable as an individual's health and safety, and we're not gonna put them in harm's way at any cost. So people know they have the right to speak up and take breaks as needed. We make sure we provide, you know, all the hydration tools that one can think of.

Talk about advances. Right? It used to just be crushing water bottles ad nauseam to the point people were washing away all their electrolytes. We've come a long way since then and now provide, like, three or four different brands of your preference.

Do you like the high salt ones? Do you like the ones a little less sugar? Like, what is the one that works for you? So provide options so that way you get a lot better opportunity of actual people using them.

The other one is, like, providing shade structures and breaks in the schedule so people know, like, when they're feeling signs or just need to as they're exerting themselves, like, when to rest and to shade up.

And then creating a process of monitoring too. So not just employees to monitor their own safety and health when it comes to heat stress, but as they're showing those signs, like, what is that mechanism for them to be able to reach out and get evaluated by your own inside team from health services so we can advise accordingly.

Those have been some pieces that we've been successful with. Then we've really, over the last few years, been focused on acclimatization. So I think this is one that can be a real challenge. When people think of Arizona, they automatically go to thinking of the desert and all the one fifteen, but our territory varies greatly. So we have times people could work at nine thousand feet elevation and, you know, working in the teens and then come down the valley in the summer, and then you'd working at one fifteen, you know, like, twenty percent humidity like we're dealing with this weekend.

So even just that workers moving in and out of those different zones, that could create a problem for acclimatization. So they're used to working within their heat range, but they come down here. It's different or vice versa. We got people working at low elevation and they go up north and it's degrees and sunny. They get problems too. Or we have, people that aren't used to working out in the field in general, whether that's new apprentices or people in the field like planners and those type of office jobs that go out there a lot less routinely.

Run into issues of not having them acclimatized and go out there and try to keep up with the groups that are and then run into issues there. So the acclimatization is somewhere we're spending a lot of focus on over the last few years to really ground that because that makes all the difference in the world. That's why you see the people on the news getting rescued from Camelback Mountain hikes all the time. Some, like, those are people that are not from here. They didn't know how to prepare their body accordingly for that, and that that builds up over time before you can just get out there and exert yourself like that. And the same goes for our field personnel. No different.

And, Ryan, just even from an organizational standpoint, what are some things that you've done from, like, a planning, resourcing, scheduling? Just, you know, if you know that you're gonna have several days in a row that are in that hundred and fifteen degree range? And what are some takeaways that other utilities might be able to have, in terms of how they could put those direct controls in place to protect the teams?

Yeah. I mean, when you think of those extreme heat days, it's actually like a three tiered approach. There's, like, one, we're trying to protect the public because it's dangerous to have outages during that time. Right?

That can be a life or death situation. And two, from, like, a grid operation, when you're running that hot or, like, close to our peak loads, like, we kinda get into, like, this no touch situation anyway where we try not to mess with it unless it's broken. So unless there's, like, an outage that, you know, comes up as emergent or, a storm that blows through, like, let's just do some minimal tasks, just keep things running. Right?

And let's try to adjust our schedules accordingly. Something that we've done for a long time is as we hit the summer months, we'll actually roll the schedules of our field crews, like, an hour earlier in the day so they can get a little bit of an earlier head start. You're not working in it, like, that peak afternoon hours if you can avoid it. Same with the scheduling the outages.

They're typically early morning for a couple of reasons I just outlined. Like, one is, you know, people at home don't really love having their air conditioners off, like, at, you know, five o'clock at night while they're trying to, like, be cooking dinner for their family. So there's a customer aspect, and then two, it's just we get our work done and get back out back to the yard by, like, you know, one PM when it's much safer. So we've asked the question a lot lately because this is like a fallacy in safety in general.

For years, we keep talking to people about stop when unsafe. Stop when unsafe. Why didn't they stop? It comes up, like, post event investigations consistently.

What we're finding is, like, as opposed to pushing so much on the stop when unsafe, why don't we put a little more emphasis to start when safe? So how do you get more preparedness, more time on the strategizing over, like, what you're gonna be doing to build yourself resiliency on the front end as opposed to reacting to. So that's another area of focus that we have right now.

And, Ryan, before we move on, you I just wanna double click on one area. You talked about creating that psychological safety for people to make wise decisions. And I would say that in construction and in the trades, there's a little bit of that machismo where people are like, they don't want to admit that they can't push through it or that, you know, they think that taking a break might be a sign of weakness. How do have you created and nurtured that environment where people feel really comfortable knowing their limits and saying, hey, I need to take a quick break here and and get cooled off.

So it happens at a few levels. And one, we've been lucky that we went down this hop journey, but creating psychological safety. So just in general of how we respond to injuries and events has just significantly improved over the last decade. We used to be, like, very reactionary.

Like, who did it? What happened? Like, you know, as soon as something happened. And now it's like, the response is, is everyone okay?

Like, what is this?

Is there anything that needs to be done from, like, an operation standpoint immediately to get things back in a good position? And then we'll figure out what happened, and we're gonna learn from it together. So creating that psychological safety in the safety space has bled over into a lot of areas with field workers. But the second part, which is actually the harder part to influence, is more of this peer to peer relationship.

Right? Because in those trades that that kind of bro masculinity that you just talked about, that can be hard to overcome but there's some people like take like a pride of ownership like I don't take breaks and no one on my crew should either and they're setting themselves up for, you know, what could be something that, you know, it's hard to come back from. If they're the one responsible for kinda setting the tone of that group, if you got someone in the team that, you know, is pushing people past their limits, you see this a lot with apprentices that are going in there trying to prove themselves, and they don't wanna, like, speak up and say, like, they're not at the cut enough to be able to do the job, but there comes a time when it's difference between training smart and just being stupid and ignoring the signs.

So how do we create that that psychological safety even at, like, the crew level? That's, like, one we're still working on. I mean, you basically have to give crew foreman, like, leadership training on how to create, you know, these right environments where people can feel safe.

Thank you, Ryan. And, Francois, when it comes to each individual, I mean, whether we're talking about cold or we're, talking about heat, each individual has a different level of tolerance. And, it's personal, but they can also start to make decisions even before they are in that environment to prepare their body to handle that. So what are some things that people can educate their, frontline workers on so that they're better able to not only become acclimatized or better able to tolerate working in those conditions, but also be smart about the decisions that they're making over the course of the day so that the impact of them in these extreme environments is is less.

Yeah. And it it's it's very important listening to Ryan, like, realize the complexity of dealing with these conditions. And one thing we need to understand is mother nature will always win. So even if you think you can you can beat her and you're gonna show up and be tougher than mother nature, she will kick your ass.

You're gonna show up in a situation where something's gonna go wrong. There's gonna be so it is a management issue down the road. There are some biological differences between individuals and a lot of them a lot of these differences, and they've been well modeled in science, are linked to your body mass. So somebody that tends to be bigger will be retaining heat more.

It might take longer to warm up, but once the heat is in, it will be re the person will be retaining heat much, much more. But also the shape of your body, if you have very you're very stringy versus being very stocky, you will get these differences. So these are the basic biological differences that you get between individuals. But then there's the whole history, like, where are you from?

How did you grow up? What did your parents how did they again, I come from Canada. You know, French Canadians are tougher in the cold than anybody else, and we all made mistakes. We all got frostbite.

We all got injured because we just had to suck it up and keep pushing.

You end up in these situations where it's exactly the same thing, and it's hard to put all of this together and be able to understand when a person shows up where is the starting point. And I think this is where the training and being more proactive and less reactive is we start everybody from the same level. That's what I do with coal, by the way, with the work I'm doing with soldiers. Some of them are tremendously knowledgeable. I worked in Alaska. I worked in Finland. I worked with, all kinds of groups coming from different places.

But the reality is I'd rather start them all at the same base. We all start from the same point, and we ramp it up from there. So there are some some basic understanding. So the main reason is nobody's gonna be the same coming into this.

You might be lucky that some people basically are twins and have gone through exactly the same upbringing and everything's identical. You might be lucky. But even in the decisions that people make, the variability is so high. And in science, we love to model these things.

Like, we're gonna model things biologically and tell people, okay, this is how you're gonna survive and this is what you need to do. Anybody coming up with a very specific recipe, I don't what you think about this, Ryan, but with a very specific recipe that everybody must do this, that's when you start getting in trouble. Yeah.

No. I totally agree. The one size fits all approach, it's one person really well, and everyone else has to suffer a little bit. But yeah. And even, like, when we tried to structure it because that's the way some initial OSHA recommendations were coming out around heat. Like, every so X time, you're gonna have a break and every hour, you're gonna drink this much fluids. Your point, I'm like, that might be detrimental to one person.

Like, this person doesn't need a break here.

This person's over hydrating. So you need to be give people the flexibility and the tools and the knowledge to make decisions for themselves and be more in tune and listen to their body.

Yeah. And, basically, there's monitoring ways that we can monitor the effects on our body. Heart rate is one of them. Your breathing rate, your sweat rate, all these things can be used to monitor and then be able to put that in the equation for the given individual to be able to to understand themselves, but also tell people, okay.

When I'm in the heat or I'm in these conditions, this is what's happening to me. When I'm wearing this type of equipment, this is how my body's responding. So all these things about sharing and not making it as a weakness, but actually as a strength. So instead of showing up as cowboys that we can face anything and we can be in any firefight and we'll always win, to show up with the being the best at the job so good that everybody comes back, works to their maximum, always comes back without injuries.

But this is teamwork and you need to work together on this and you need to understand that whatever state you're in affects the state of the entire team. And I think this is, again, part of the complexity of facing heat stress is it's not purely biological, it's not purely psychological. There's that whole workplace environment and culture that is tremendously important.

Francois, can you walk us through some of the I think you have ten different things that, people can focus on just as a checklist for individuals to understand how to better modulate heat.

Yeah. I'll do that. And and just before we get to this, because it is important, one thing about the variability between individuals is also modifiable factors that we need to think about. So I used to fly planes and every time you showed up with the instructor, they would ask you a few questions.

Some of these questions, are you taking new medication? Did you sleep last night? Are you well hydrated? Did you eat?

Are you stressed? Any family stress or whatever? These were kind of factors that we discussed because they will affect your capacity to work at your maximum. So this is again, to me, something as part of the culture that should be shared.

There's some substances that people take, nicotine and I'm gonna keep it simple, let's say snus, like nicotine pouches to stimulate, very common within the military, does have an effect in your thermal response. But there's caffeine, there's alcohol, all these things have an effect. So I just wanted to mention these modifiable factors for sure. And this is stuff that should definitely be discussed.

When it comes to the ten approach, and it's funny because some of the ten rules I wanted to bring up, Ryan already mentioned them. And I think one of the top ones that's right on top there is heat acclimatization because a lot of people think you can just show up and you'll suck it up and your body's gonna be fine. And you're talking about seven to fourteen days and that's certainly how much time it takes. When you go to high altitude, by the way, you will do acclimatization before you go, let's say to base camp of Everest.

When we went to the heat and cold, we seem to just ignore these things and we think we can just show up and face them without being prepared, which is kind of funny to think that the same issues kind of pop up. Staying fit does improve your capacity to face whatever stressful conditions related to heat, whether heat, cold, it will make a difference. So staying fit means your body learns to operate under stress very differently than if you're completely unfit. Also that comes with all kinds of chronic issues related to blood flow and all these things that can have a lot of effect.

We did talk about hydration. Again, when do you hydrate? When do you put electrolytes? So hydration is one.

And then the other one would be, when do I put electrolytes into my water? So hydration is key. We need to put water back into the system as we're using it for evaporation. Like Ryan mentioned, I will be diluting my electrolytes.

So the rule is anything above one hour, you need to have this conversation about electrolytes. Some stuff works better for some people, works less for other people, and this these are things that needs to be discussed. Change in body weight also indicates the color of your urine also indicates how much dehydration you you've gotten. Your heart rate also tells you if you're operating and you're you can feel your heart pounding, you're hyperventilating.

These are all indications that you might become that you might become dehydrated. I'm just gonna put my glasses here because I am struggling with the eyesight. The whole idea of pacing is tremendously important. As we said, we are creating heat also internally.

And Ryan, as you were mentioning, how to create instead of being reactive to be proactive, how do we build it in a way, this is the day, this is what the day is gonna look like, this is how we plan it, and this is how we pace ourselves. And if you look at the average performance, even though you're pacing, you'll end up with a better performance at the end of the day. That if you come in rushing, where we think if we work hard and fast, we do it for less amount of time. Well, you might not end up with a better job and you might end up with also injuries.

The whole concept of work rest in the shade, tremendously important. You work in the sun, but you need to have time to be able to rest in the shade. Clothing and PPE, that's a huge aspect. Again, the industry is developing new types of clothing to be able, but there's basic things that sometimes you just need protection.

And this protection will just aggravate the situation, which means changes my hydration status, changes how I need to work under this clothing, and this is needs to be tremendously well understood. There are some active ways we can cool. Some of them, that are used by firefighters is cooling the forearms, which is very efficient at cooling where you have these little tubs and you can put it there's ice water and you can actually cool fairly well. So whenever you get a chance, be more proactive and instead of waiting until it's too late, try to do it earlier on.

And then you you schedule smart, again, working at times of the day that are not as bad.

And one of the huge component is the education. What you want is, okay, what do I need to know and what do I do if there's an issue? And to be able to work as a buddy, to work within the buddy system that everybody's keeping an eye on everybody to make sure that we're not ending up with any type of injuries.

Thank you, Francois. And Ryan, one of the things that, is coming to mind as we're having this conversation is you've done a lot in high energy safety. And one of the principles we know there is that the pre job brief is one of the most important times to implement a safe work structure, with individual crews based on what the actual job is that they're performing and the risks that are gonna be ahead of them. I was just thinking about Arizona.

You know, it's monsoon season, so it may be one hundred and fifteen degrees regularly in a dry heat, and people are used to that. But then you have a rainstorm, you know, the night before, two inches of rain, and all of a sudden that humidity level goes up. And the heat that they're going to experience the next day is different than the heat that they experienced the day before. You might have people who spend a big chunk of their day in air conditioned environments in Arizona where it's like sixty five degrees and then, you know, you open the door and it's one hundred and ten outside.

What are some things that people can do before they start the work during that pre job brief to highlight some of the risks that are present, improve the communication, improve some of the things that Francois just talked about in terms of, like, reminders that people, can put into place in terms of, like, individual prevention steps that they can put in place.

Yeah. That's a good point. This is something we wrestle with a lot because when it comes to heat stress resilience, there's a lot of individual factors that are at play that I don't have a lot of control of as either a manager in safety or even, like, one of their, you know, peers in the crew. Like, I can't control if someone, you know, doesn't take care of their body.

We can't control if they decided to go out drinking the night before, but what they can do during the pre job brief conversation is get a good litmus of where's everyone at today. Like, here's the task at hand. We got, like, two people that got some strenuous jobs. We have one guy that's gonna be observer on the ground getting tools, like, who's in the right mindset and physically prepared to do that task, and let's put people in the right positions to be successful.

Let's not be so stringent like on the was up in the air, you know, last job. So now you need to be up in the air this time when your coworker's not feeling so well. So, again, it's more on that realm of how you create psychological safety, but it's also bringing up, hey. In the case, like, you're not feeling well during this, like, you know, let me know, and we'll swap you out.

And then you didn't go in the truck and shade up and recover. I've seen that work really well in the crew setting.

But those people work with each other quite often, so you know if someone's acting a little differently too is what Francois put up about the different, like, warning sides. Like, we had a discussion earlier about, like, irritability about all of it. Right? If someone's acting differently or being, like, very short-tempered or it's just, like seems like their decision making is starting to deteriorate, like, it's time to make the call for them.

Be like, hey. Come out of the air and swap them out because I know we're talking about the risk of actual heat stress injuries, but if your mind's not in the game, now you're gonna be making errors that are other more costly, you know, like some high energy or you're doing the wrong switching or guys not, you know, as accurate as they are landing the jumper wire and so they have an arc flash. That's pretty dangerous situation. So a lot of time in the pre jump brief, it's like identifying like, hey.

I got the cooler water over here. If we need more, like, let us know. We'll send someone to the gas station to go pick up more, know the signs, and everyone look out for each other. But that pacing that Francois talked about, I think that's awesome.

Because I've seen that too where it's just like, it's just red line to the finish line, but I'm like, you're running your vehicle on red line too often. I'm like, you're doing some, you know, adding some extra wear and tear that, you know, you're not gonna easily recover from.

Francois, before we wrap stuff up, can you talk about the Ryan just mentioned this but the cognitive impact of heat, and especially as it relates to just our overall attitudes and agitation levels in decision making?

Yeah. So that's an and it hasn't been well studied. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, observations that show you that heat does have a tremendous impact on how people respond to stress. And and this is, again, something that we need to remember. Heat is dangerous.

So and you would see the same thing in animals, by the way. As it gets warm, you're gonna see if you force them to stay in the heat, they'll do everything in their power to get out of that heat. Like, it's biologically what the what the human body wants to do. Does not wanna stay in that condition. And you condition yourself to stay out there, and you're constantly fighting these signs internally that tell you you cannot keep sustaining this. So it's finding the balance between again, and that's where the acclimatization plays a big role where you can learn about your body's responses in this. You can articulate them.

You can tell a person, okay. When I've been out for an hour and then fifteen minutes, this is how I generally feel, and this is what I'm gonna be doing, and be able to document these things and even log them down so you know how your body's responding under these conditions. And I think the issues become in terms of condition or in terms of even of mental health and potentially even some traumatic events that could occur because you pushed too hard and you made a mistake and something happened is the fact that we're ignoring a lot of these signs that are occurring way before something bad happens. But also as you come in and you're learning the job and you're learning how to operate in these conditions, you kind of have to learn it from other people that have gained this experience and it has to be done in a way that's an open conversation. So I do believe that heat mentally is tremendously challenging and the body will do everything to get you out of that condition.

And this is why that conditioning is so important that the know how and know how to manage and how to make the right decisions before facing it is very important. So if you're ignoring all of this, the risk to even having issues towards your mental health and even kind of cognition issues in terms of making the wrong decisions are much, much higher.

Well, Francois, thanks so much for sharing your knowledge, to this group. I mean, you've focused on so many different populations over the course of your, career, and we just really appreciate you bringing that to the trades. And Ryan, thank you for your leadership and the way that you were able to bring some of these concepts about how other organizations can put, safety systems in place to protect their workers and also think about how we can educate individual workers on how to recognize the early signs of heat exposure and heat stress, but then also, you know, the things that they can do proactively to prevent that from happening.

So I think the key takeaway for me is that there's no one size fits all. I mean, every single individual is different in terms of how they're gonna adapt or be impacted by the heat. Every organization has different stressors, but there are systems that we can put in place to protect the workforce. There's education that we can provide the workforce so that they're better equipped to meet those challenges and be proactive.

And so, as a follow-up to this conversation, what we're going do is we're going to make this recording available to everyone. So please pass it around to others on your team. I think it's a great starting point.

We're also going to provide those heat readiness resources that Francois walked us through, and you can definitely feel free to utilize within your organization so that we can continue to spread the word and help people stay safe and healthy. I would encourage you also to listen to the Work Ready podcast episode that Francois and I had where we dive in really, really deep into the science. And I think it's a great platform to be able to understand these impacts, more thoroughly. So until next time, make sure to, again, dive into these resources, share them with your team, spread the word.

And we would invite you to join us next month for, this live event. You can go to the venosity dot com website, and you can pull up resources and look up, safety talks, and that's where you'll find all the previous events. So thank you so much. We really appreciate you joining us today.