safety in heat
to all. been in the woods 37 years. please tote more water than you think you need. just do it. load will get lighter as the day progresses. i have loved this career, you gotta get home to those you care for and who care for our crazy selves.
PLEASE ALL BE SAFE. 97 IN CAMDEN SOUTH CAROLINA TODAY
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Stood in the shade for nearly an hour around 7:00 p.m. yesterday chatting with my farm worker about his 30 years of Army, National Guard, contract worker for Lockheed-Martin experiences in Kuwait, Afghanistan, Germany, Korea and other assorted locations. There was almost no breeze. Comfortable or we wouldn’t have been having the chat. Checked in to find it was 106 F.
You just can’t do that if you spend two-thirds of your time in air-conditioned environments.
You just can’t do that if you spend two-thirds of your time in air-conditioned environments.
Great point. The same is true at the other end of the thermometer as well. Our bodies really will acclimate to the environment with sufficient water, food, rest, and periodic shelter. In Interior Alaska, part of the acclimation is that your skin seems to dry out a bit (not carrying as much water) and is therefore able to handle the cold substantially better.
Kind of like lifting weights: If you want to lift heavier, you gotta…lift heavier. If you want to be able to work in the heat, you gotta…work in the heat.
I feel fortunate to live in a place where we don’t have excessive heat, plenty of water resources (no drought), plenty of electrical power (although they have closed a number of coal fired plants, but we also don’t have the steel mills anymore), plenty of gas resources (Marcellus Shale) , no wildfires, no earthquakes…
I have worked at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas in the summer, brutal. But we were very careful about hydration, etc.
When schools begin their Fall preseason sports practices it is extremely easy to separate them into two groups. Farm kids and everyone else.
Fifty-plus years ago it was even easier. That was prior to the invention of the big, round hay baler that is seen almost everywhere today. Riding wagons and trucks out in the hayfield half of the day. spending the other half of the day plus half of the night handling the small, square bales that ranged from 50 pounds to over 100 pounds each was WORK, Sometimes loading and storing up to 1500 per day in whatever the conditions were built muscles, dark tans and character. You quickly learned how to get the most productivity with the least effort by handling each bale correctly, every time. Every bale was handled at least twice, once in the field and once into final storage.
Every bale was handled at least twice, once in the field and once into final storage.
Plus the easy step of putting it in the long elevator to get it into the barn for careful stacking (in crosswise layers so they wouldn’t put too much strain on the side of the barn).
That was after we switched from using the “4-tined octopus” fork that pulled up to trolley at the peak of the barn. We had to re-stack the bales in a certain pattern in the wagon so the fork could grab a group of them properly.
There’s more than one reason I went to engineering school.
.When schools begin their Fall preseason sports practices it is extremely easy to separate them into two groups. Farm kids and everyone else.
Fifty-plus years ago it was even easier. That was prior to the invention of the big, round hay baler that is seen almost everywhere today. Riding wagons and trucks out in the hayfield half of the day. spending the other half of the day plus half of the night handling the small, square bales that ranged from 50 pounds to over 100 pounds each was WORK, Sometimes loading and storing up to 1500 per day in whatever the conditions were built muscles, dark tans and character. You quickly learned how to get the most productivity with the least effort by handling each bale correctly, every time. Every bale was handled at least twice, once in the field and once into final storage.
AMEN. It’s even worse if it’s peanut hay. Those vines are still dusty from the inverters and the harvesters don’t know much of it off. At the end of the day you can only see skin where the rivulets of sweat washed it off. I DO NOT miss those days at all.
I did have one concession to the heat that I did enjoy. A doctor from town had a swimming pool at this cabin next to our farm. It was fed by an artesian well. 65 degrees year round. This time of year I’d drop a couple of just picked watermelons in the pool first thing in the morning and by lunch they were a cool welcome treat. Jumping in the pool to retrieve those melons would cause quite a shock to the system, but I loved it.
Andy
I stacked hay with my cousin running the farmhand, I was 14 the first year I did it, I do believe my back issues are related to that work.
I worked on a project in Pueblo, Colorado one summer and it was so brutally hot down there they’d pour concrete between 7 PM and 7 AM some days. I talked with the contractors a bit and one guy said Pueblo was a relief– he had come from Arizona where they had to keep their tools in buckets of water so they wouldn’t burn their hands on them. When I heard that I was like you have got to be kidding me…
My first survey job as a teen was in Saudi as a helper, in summer. Routinely over 120 during peak sun. We??d start working 5 am and break around 10:30 am. Try and sleep with a wet towel for a blanket until around 3:30 and go back it until it was too dark to see. Too much sun and heat stroke was a serious risk and it can kill. Drank lot of water and ate salt tablets. End of the day I??d look like a frosted corn flake from salt on my skin and clothes. I do not miss it. Alaska is much more to my liking.
Willyto all. been in the woods 37 years. please tote more water than you think you need. just do it. load will get lighter as the day progresses. i have loved this career, you gotta get home to those you care for and who care for our crazy selves.
PLEASE ALL BE SAFE. 97 IN CAMDEN SOUTH CAROLINA TODAY
Camden gets hot! Lovely place. Spent some time there as a kid. Fishing in the Wateree river is the best!
I hope everyone has a great day; I know I will!
@holy-cow Like this. Well my bales are not the 100 pound ones. The horse people (mostly ladies here) like them around 50#s tops. But my 11 and 7 year old girls love to help.
@williwaw I did a job in Djioubiti Africa There were days it hit over 130 F . Had a Trimble 5601 that bit the dust. So hot the oil and grease just ran out of that sucker. Did not stop a wild T-3 though. Lol . I had early mornings and late afternoons to run levels. We had about an hour in the a.m. and about the same in the afternoon we could run the dini level with invar rods to achieve the results we needed. Ended up having about 7 miles worth of levels ran over the project. So hot some bird that looked like a pigeon a few would just kill over while flying. Looked like a dove shoot on some days. Dry heat. You could just drink water constantly from camel baks. All day and not go to the bathroom but once in morning and once at night. But I would take that heat over the humidity of Mississippi Tennessee South Carolina or North Carolina and sometimes Virginia any day.
Every once in awhile we had the luxury of an elevator to get them from a truck/trailer bed to a hay loft. Most of the time we had to buck them up to the opening. That bottom layer was the killer. Sometimes they went down off the truck to start building up from ground level, then somewhat level, then buck them all up to each higher level. When that was more than head high, you ate a lot of hay whether you wanted to or not. Regular barns, old sheds, old houses, a couple of old school buildings, box cars and open stacks out in a proper location for drainage piled as high as possible and then covered over with long slough grass mowed off, gathered by pitch fork and placed by pitch fork (worked fairly well at shedding rain).
Our farm always produced more hay than we needed for our own use. That meant reloading, hauling to a buyer and then putting the hay in their storage space, whatever that happened to be. I was guaranteed to touch every bale four times. Twice in Summer and twice in Winter.
Yes, sir. Seeing blonde-headed girls working with the hay is super-familiar to me. The middle one was about 14 when she made the mistake of swinging upwards to hook the end of a bale and missed. The tip of the hook hit her square on top of the head and made a solid hit. She was seeing stars that time When she parted her hair just right you could see the little scar for years. The oldest daughter could handle hay at 13 far better than her 13 and 15 year-old boy cousins who also grew up on a farm. Once during her Senior year of high school, one of her boy classmates was trying to give her a hard time. He was about 6′ 2″ and 200 pounds. She told him to knock it off or she would stuff him in a nearby 30 gallon trash barrel. He dared her to try. Big mistake. She succeeded on the first try in front of his buddies.
Here are some powerlifting statistics for a teenage farm gal I happen to know.
Do not drink only plain water??Google rhabdomyolysis
I find snacking constantly helps a lot.
@holy-cow I love it. My 7 year old is a natural worker. She believes she is helping by running through the field and turning all the bales from their side to flat. But she has actually become productive on the hay wagon. She will push pull drag to keep me a spot to load on the wagon. Once i get to many I will jump up and stack then start all over again. The 11 year old has developed the strength to get them picked up and on the wagon for a bit. And she can stack them in barn as long as I can get them on the same level pretty good.
The 11 year old asked one day why we had to help. I said you will be starting middle school this year. You will have boys wanting to kiss you. So you will need your strength. Now the wife and I had our anniversary this past Monday. She made us a card wishing us happy anniversary. And a note on it that said ??Have fun do your kissing somewhere else?. I told her she would be wanting to kiss boys soon. She said yuck. Well we all know how long that will last. But she said if a boy tries to kiss me I will toss him out like a bale of hay. You did the right thing. I am hoping and praying that I am somehow instilling a good work ethic in them and the ability to think for themselves and not be afraid of hard work. She has her moms brains and my good looks. Lol. The youngest she is all about tools measuring building things. She has ruined 5 25ft tapes in the last year. Lost 4 of my chaining pins. I use them all the time when setting up paddocks with my 300 ft steel tape. But i just keep encouraging them to try to figure out whatever it is they want the selves. With whatever they can find laying around. Both are way smarter than I am. They take after their mom in school. Every kid needs to work atleast one summer doing hay. Character building for sure.
never got that, but experienced wild mania due to over water without electrolytes and it really really sucked.
I always spilt water and Gatorade as a st@ple.
was working out in the Nevada Desert a few years back and actual was 111, ambient and radiant was a whole other story.
I blew through 20 liters of water and Gatorade and like Williwaw you could have sold salt in bags from off my skin and clothing I was so crusty.
Do not drink only plain water??Google rhabdomyolysis
I had never heard of it. Google led me to the NIOSH page, which says that dehydration can exacerbate rhabdo and shows a picture of a guy drinking plain water. So why the slam on drinking water?
Working in serious heat while drinking water without any salty foods or Gatorade-like drinks isn’t good.
1. Caffeine works against your body’s ability to regulate heat, so minimize how much you drink before and during work in the heat.
2. Drink at least 64oz of water before noon.
3. Switch to Gatorade or something similar or eat salty foods consistently throughout the day. I find that it’s easier to drink enough salt and electrolytes than it is to snack all day.
Two or three tablespoons of honey a tablespoon of Bragg’s Apple Cider Vinegar, a small pinch of kosher salt to 32oz of water keeps me going. Eat a banana at lunch for potassium and you’ll be able to beat a camel in a mid-day marathon in Death Valley.
Farmers used to make switchel (spelling?) With water, molasses, and vinegar that accomplished the same thing.
I experimented with raising the temp in my house and was surprised how much of a difference a few degrees makes. If you can tolerate setting the thermostat at 75, you should notice an improvement when working outside.
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