With Spain already sweltering under successive heatwaves that caused more than 1,000 excess deaths in June, Barcelona has begun to hand out heat-monitoring bracelets to its outdoor workers to act as an early warning system for health risks.
The city has rolled out around 1,400 bracelets for staff working outdoors, including street cleaners, lighting crews, park workers and waste management employees.
It is part of a push to adapt to “increasingly aggressive” climate change, said Pep Llimona, prevention coordinator of the city’s parks and gardens service.
The bracelet measures the workers’ body temperature and emits a sound and vibration if it senses that the wearer is at risk. If that happens, they have to stop working.
A number of street workers have died in recent years across Spain as temperatures spiked, prompting changes in working patterns and conditions.
In Barcelona, a 51-year-old woman died in June last year after sweeping streets in the city’s old town as temperatures hit 30.4 degrees Celsius (86.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Barcelona City Council said at the time it would launch an investigation into the death. A spokesperson for the city said on Thursday there had been no indication that the cause was heatstroke.
Pep Llimona said the plan to introduce heat bracelets had already been in train before the woman’s death.
“But it is true that it has helped to speed up things and has made us think a little more,” he said.
Like much of Europe, Spain has been sweltering in recent weeks, with its weather agency Aemet registering the second-hottest month of June on record. The country is braced for a second heatwave starting at the weekend.
“Because it’s getting hotter and hotter, we have to be more vigilant at work,” Brigade Supervisor Ester Jimenez said.
“As the supervisor who assigns staff tasks… I’m afraid someone might suffer heatstroke, and I see the future as complicated with this heat”.
(Reporting by Horaci Garcia, Writing by Javi West Larrañaga, editing by Aislinn Laing and Alex Richardson)
