As the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc on our world, it's easy to forget another catastrophe: climate change. The environmental crisis is still killing people — especially those who work in jobs where they can't escape extreme weather. That includes postal workers, some of whom have died due to heat on the job.
Dave Jamieson, a HuffPost senior reporter, dug into some of these deaths and what the Postal Service has done to address them. He found that it was often not nearly enough to prevent more fatalities on the job in the future, particularly as climate change gets worse.
Must Reads talked to Dave about his investigation.
How did you learn about this issue and begin to dig for the story?
I read a story in the LA Daily News about Peggy Frank, the letter carrier in the lede who died in July 2018. I realized there were other letter carriers who had died in extreme heat in recent years, too, so I requested the case files on those deaths. We don't think of postal jobs as being strenuous or dangerous, but they certainly can be. I thought it could be an illuminating way to write about how climate change will expose workers of all kinds to more extreme heat, and how we aren't remotely ready for it.
You highlight several postal workers who died, including Peggy Frank and John Watzlawick. Can you tell us more about reporting out their specific stories?
In both cases, their family members were very helpful — Peggy's sister, Lynn Calkins, and John's widow, Kay. They were both well aware of the long history of heat hazards at the postal service, and still upset about the safety lapses that preceded their loved ones' deaths. John's case was a big deal at the time, and the USPS fought the citation in the case, so there was also a large case file that laid out everything that happened.
The piece highlights multiple failures to address obvious health and safety issues within USPS — and how the process of fines and reforms has failed in the past. Has there been any progress?
The Postal Service has formalized a heat illness prevention program in the wake of all these incidents. There's a lot of good common-sense stuff in there. But the citations keep coming, even after Peggy's death in 2018. There are a lot of letter carriers out there, and we need to get the mail to people's houses six days a week, so it's probably inevitable that some people are going to suffer heat stress. But the Postal Service clearly has a problem with carriers going out there unacclimatized and not ready for severe heat. As the story shows, a lot of it comes down to cost. There is pressure on carriers to get the job done on time.
As you note, postal work is far from the only occupation where climate change is creating new dangers. Can you share more about that?
I think of postal work as a good canary in the coal mine — the jobs are everywhere, and they're not as taxing as a lot of other outdoor duties. So if a letter carrier can get sick and even die in high heat, what is climate change going to mean for someone picking tomatoes in Southwest Florida for eight hours a day? Or a roofer who's fully exposed to the sun in Phoenix all summer long? We had a climate researcher at Stanford, Michelle Tigchelaar, create some data and maps showing how much more treacherous these working days will become over time. You can see it all in a time lapse in the story. It makes me worry for our future.
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