On December 12, 2024, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) announced a first-of-its-kind citation for a willful violation of California’s Heat Illness Prevention regulations. Per the Agency’s press release, the citation carries with it a $276,425 penalty for deliberately and knowingly failing to follow heat protection requirements.
Cal/OSHA’s findings include a failure on the part of the employer, a landscape maintenance company, to provide its employees with heat illness training, as well as failing to provide access to worksite water and shaded areas. Cal/OSHA further found that the company failed to implement written procedures for addressing work conditions in high temperatures. Requiring employees to purchase their own drinking water also violated the California standard.
The company was previously cited in 2022 for failing to meet heat safety requirements and not implementing preventative measures ensuring worker safety, even where the company had been provided with model heat illness prevention procedures.
Earlier this year, California implemented indoor heat safety standards to join its existing outdoor standards. Cal/OSHA summarizes both standards and employer requirements on its Heat Illness Prevention website. Outdoor employers should ensure employees have access to fresh, cool, free-of-charge water, and shaded rest areas when temperatures exceed 80 degrees. These employers should encourage workers to take cool down rest periods, and workers who request cool-down rest periods should be allowed to take one. Outdoor employers should also implement a heat illness prevention plan, as well as high heat (equal to or above 95 degrees) procedures for addressing employee heat safety. Employee training, acclimatization, and emergency response procedures round out the requirements. Cal/OSHA’s press release announcing the willful citation includes references to the agency’s Heat Illness Prevention website and its Heat Illness Prevention online tool.
A long-awaited federal heat standard (which we previously discussed here) was proposed earlier this year, with the current public comment period scheduled to close on January 14, 2025. As we await whether the new administration will pursue this proposal, states such as California continue to push forward with standards and enforcement of their own. We will continue to follow federal and state OSHA developments on the Corporate Environmental Lawyer blog.
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