The Bilingual Safety Guy

Every summer, the forecast turns into a warning. And every summer, the same hard truth gets ignored until someone collapses on a job site: heat is not an inconvenience — it’s the deadliest weather there is. I say that as someone who spent years as a paramedic before I ever wrote a safety plan. I’ve knelt next to workers whose bodies had simply stopped being able to cool themselves. What I learned then, and what I teach now, is that heat illness is almost entirely preventable, but only if we stop treating a heatwave like a bad-weather day and start treating it like the hazard it actually is. Here’s what the numbers say, what to watch for, and what to actually do about it. Heat is the number-one weather killer This surprises people, because hurricanes and tornadoes get the headlines. But the data is consistent and it isn’t close. Over the most recent 30-year period (1994–2023), heat killed an average of 183 people a year in the United States, more than floods (88), tornadoes (...

The men's mental health numbers we don't talk about When it comes to men's mental health, the numbers are sobering. The men around us are struggling at least as much as anyone. They're just better at hiding it. Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, to answer "How are you?" with "I'm good" whether it's true or not. To tough it out. To be the steady one. So we bury it. The numbers above are what that burying costs. I know, because for most of my adult life I was one of those statistics waiting to happen. "I'm good." "Can't complain." "Just busy." I said it a thousand times, usually when it was the furthest thing from the truth. I wore my stress like a badge of honor and called it being dependable. On the outside, I had it all together. On the inside, I was running on fumes — bad sleep, short temper, snapping at the people I loved most, convinced that asking for help would make me look weak. F...