Soon after the sweltering summer heat got to Rich Dyer, a letter carrier in St. George, the weather started to cool down a smidge.
“Since the day I went out at the end of July, the weather’s taken a turn, like 10 degrees cooler every day,” said Dyer, whose doctor told him to take time off from delivering mail. “All of a sudden I take off … and they OK’d it to be out of work for a month, and the weather’s cooled off.”
It’s the second summer in a row that Dyer, 65, an Air Force veteran who has worked for the United States Postal Service for 17 years, has dealt with heat-related illness.
It’s a problem that letter carriers across the country have faced. In Texas, postal workers rallied in San Antonio in August for better working conditions, while in a Dallas suburb, a letter carrier died in June of a suspected heat-related illness — a case that prompted members of Congress to voice their concerns to the Postmaster General.
According to a 2019 Center for Public Integrity analysis of data from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), at least 93 USPS employees nationwide were hospitalized for confirmed or suspected heat-related illness between January 2015 and October 2018.
The reporting of heat-related deaths isn’t done uniformly across the United States, The Associated Press reported in August — and Utah is one of two states that doesn’t “track heat-related deaths where exposure to extreme heat was a secondary factor.”
Phil Rodriquez, a 29-year veteran of USPS and president of the Utah chapter of the National Association of Letter Carriers, said that “more than any other summer I’ve worked, this has probably been the worst.”
At least three times a week, Rodriquez said, a carrier has called him complaining of symptoms of heat-related illness. Often, he said, those carriers need medical care.
When contacted for response, a USPS spokesperson provided a statement, which said “the safety of our employees is a top priority. Our carriers deliver the mail throughout the year during varying temperatures and climatic conditions. This includes during the summer months, when the temperatures rise throughout the country,” the statement said.
Work days in a ‘hot box’
When Dyer first joined USPS, he said, “I was told that the job was part-time flexible and I’d be working somewhere between 19 and 25 hours a week to start. As it turned out [in] 17 years, I don’t think I’ve worked less than 40 hours more than about five weeks.”
Dyer’s route, he said, has 692 addresses on it. That’s around 620 physical stops he makes, six days a week.
“My truck gets filled to the roof, from front door to back door, close to every day,” Dyer said. “There really is no eight-hour day. You work until the job is done.”
The truck, like many others in USPS’s fleet, does not have air conditioning — which can be dangerous when working in the summer heat.
“They’re a hot box, they’re aluminum,” Dyer said, “and St. George doesn’t have a lot of shade, so the sun is just beating down on you.”
His route consists of a lot of stopping every 10 feet, to deliver mail at doors, so he gets a lot of walking done between stops.
Because Dyer has diabetes, and is “apparently very prone to dehydration,” he said, he gets a blood test every three months to test his kidney function. After his most recent test, he said, a doctor from the Department of Veterans Affairs called him and said, “You’re severely dehydrated. Your kidneys are going close to non-functioning.”
Dyer was given fluids intravenously for a couple of hours, and his doctor gave him strict orders to take time off work for a while, because the heat could make things worse. Dyer said he was suffering from a backache, dizziness and lightheadedness — all symptoms associated with dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Long shifts, short staffs
Rodriquez said letter carriers are exposed to the elements constantly, on work shifts lasting up to 11 hours.
“When you’re out there for that amount of time, 11 hours every day, exposed to the sun, especially during the summer, you can’t avoid not having some sort of heat-related illness.” Rodriquez said.
“Those vehicles get up to 140 degrees and all they have in [them] is a fan,” he added. “All it does is blow out hot air.”
The reason for the long shifts, Rodriquez said, is a shortage of carriers, an ongoing issue since the COVID-19 pandemic. Both nationally and in the Salt Lake City area, which has 11 post offices, “we are critically understaffed,” he said.
“We are mandated to deliver everything every day,” Rodriquez said, adding that he’s been working 60-hour weeks for the last four years. “It has been this way for probably about five years, I’m not hopeful that it will get better,” he said.
Though OSHA has guidelines to prevent heat-related illness, Rodriquez said USPS’ protocols are inadequate.
“The program itself is basically nothing but try to keep yourself hydrated. Nothing more,” he said. “They have no precautions in there to prevent heat-related injuries.”
One thing postal employees are taught, he said, is to monitor themselves for heat-related illness. That doesn’t always translate well to daily practice.
“So if a letter carrier pulls over, and they’re stationary for X amount of time, then they’re brought in the next day and they have to explain to their supervisor, under threat of discipline, why they were stationary for X amount of time,” Rodriquez said.
The statement from USPS mentions the postal service’s national Heat Illness Prevention Program (HIPP), which “provides mandatory heat-related and other safety training and instruction to all employees and assures they have the resources needed to do their jobs safely. …”Carriers are reminded to ensure they’re hydrated, wear appropriate clothing, including hats, get in the shade whenever possible, and to take sufficient amounts of water and ice with them out on their routes,” the USPS statement said. “Carriers are further instructed to contact 9-1-1 in the event they begin experiencing any symptoms of heat exhaustion or heat stroke, and they are provided with information to help them identify the symptoms associated with these two forms of heat illness.”
Getting new trucks
In 2021, USPS announced a 10-year contract for nearly $3 billion with Oshkosh Defense, a Wisconsin company, to build a new generation of postal vehicles, some 50,000 of them — which would have such improvements as air conditioning.
When the announcement was made, USPS estimated the first new trucks would hit the streets in October 2023. In May 2023, however, the service said those vehicles wouldn’t arrive until June 2024.
For some members of Congress, 10 years to upgrade USPS’s fleet isn’t fast enough. One bill, the Peggy Frank Memorial Act — named for a California letter carrier who died on the job in 2018 — would mandate the postal service get air conditioning into its vehicles within three years. The bill was last introduced in the U.S. House in 2022, but was not enacted.
When new vehicles arrive, Utah may not get them right away, said Mike Wahlquist, president of NALC’s branch 111, which represents some 1,000 carriers, from Bountiful to Orem and from Dugway to Heber City. Because it’s considered a smaller market, he said, Utah is likely at the tail end of locations getting the new air-conditioned trucks.
When the Teamsters union ratified a contract with United Parcel Service in August, one of the postal service’s biggest competitors, one of the stipulations was that every new UPS vehicle bought, starting in 2024, would be air-conditioned.
USPS, Wahlquist said, is “always 10 to 15 years behind where they want to be, as far as vehicles go. … The vehicles we’ve been using up until now, a lot of them are from 1987 to 1995. They’re all like 20 years old.”
Wahlquist said he started as a letter carrier in 1987 and “the vehicles we had then were even worse, and they didn’t even have power steering.”
When he was in his 20s, Wahlquist said, he got heat stroke while on the job, because of the pressure to deliver the mail. There’s no set quota for USPS employees to meet, but managers, he said, “have computer programs to try to put pressure on you, by saying how long it should take in a perfect situation, but there’s no situation that’s perfect.”
Adapting and coping
Richard Taylor has been a letter carrier in St. George for 28 years — and when working in the heat, he said, “the older you get, it gets even rougher.”
Taylor’s office, he said, delivers “almost all” the Amazon packages in St. George. “We have like Christmas volume packages every single day,” he said.
Though he said he’s lucky, because his truck has air conditioning. It took him 25 years on the job to get it, though — and in that time, he’s developed some tricks to keep cool without it.
“I would stop, [go] to a convenience store or go into a business and just sit there and cool down,” he said.
When he was the union branch president in St. George, Taylor said he suggested USPS employees drive themselves to a convenience store, buy a Gatorade and step into the beer cooler for 5 to 10 minutes.
“Supervisors [would] go, ‘We can’t have everyone doing that,’ and I said, ‘It’s either that or they drop. What do you want?’” Taylor said.
But even with that trick, employees would have to spend their own money, Taylor said — unless a manager stashed a case of sports drinks in the office.
‘A friend relationship’
Rodriquez said “it’s rather scary” as the president of the union’s Utah chapter, to see these issues with heat-related illnesses.
“It is not sustainable,” he said. “I fear that we’re going to have more heat-related injuries, that some of them might be fatal.”
Dyer said he’s scheduled to go back to work on Friday. His doctor has ordered him not to work more than 8 hours in a day, he said, “which will mean that the post office can’t force me to work more than that.”
Despite the problems that come with the job, Dyer said he really enjoys his work. He carries a box of dog biscuits, to calm any dogs on his route. One of his customers invites him to their Thanksgiving celebration every year.
“I know their kids, their kids’ birthdays … it’s no longer a customer relationship, it’s a friend relationship,” he said. “I’ve developed a good rapport with my customers, knowing that I’m providing a service for them. That’s very important.”
As for those new air-conditioned vehicles USPS ordered, Dyer said, “I’m likely to be retired long before I see those trucks.”
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