CA:Officials offer training to prevent farm deaths

This is a good thing but while they're there they should be rounding up and deporting illegal farm workers!

Thursday, Jul. 10, 2008
Officials offer training to prevent farm deaths

With temperatures edging to record levels, state officials and agricultural leaders Wednesday unveiled plans for stepped-up heat-stress training for farm labor contractors statewide.

The announcement was in tandem with a heat advisory for the Valley and disclosure of an investigation into a second potentially heat-related death of a farmworker this summer.

"Farm labor in normal conditions is a challenge," said Barry Bedwell, who heads the Fresno-based California Grape and Tree Fruit League. "On a day like today, it can be brutal."

Temperatures were at 106 degrees in Fresno as Bedwell talked.

The United Farm Workers on Wednesday said Jose Macarena Hernandez, 64, died during a record-breaking heat wave on June 20 while harvesting butternut squash in Santa Maria. A funeral mass will be held Friday in Santa Maria.

Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said the state is investigating whether the death was heat-related and is awaiting the results of a coroner's report.

On May 14, Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez collapsed while working for Merced Farm Labor in a vineyard owned by West Coast Grape Farming outside Stockton. The 17-year-old farmworker was taken to a hospital. She died May 16.

The state shut down Merced Farm Labor in mid-June because the company reportedly wasn't making sure that all its employees received heat training.

Merced Farm Labor was allowed to send its laborers back to the fields June 26 after it proved to Cal-OSHA that it met all heat-protection requirements. But state inspectors found it again was not complying with regulations, and the company was shut down again July 3. It appealed the closure, but that appeal was denied Tuesday.

The new heat-stress training program, which will offer 13 seminars in Spanish and English starting today and continuing through Aug. 7, was developed in the past two weeks. It involves a partnership between 15 farm organizations, Cal OSHA and the California Department of Industrial Relations. The effort is called "Heat Stress Prevention in Agriculture."

Anticipating the heat wave, 10 Cal OSHA teams began making enforcement sweeps statewide on Monday, said Len Welsh, Cal OSHA chief.

Welsh said the new training will emphasize four points: Providing and encouraging drinking of water, offering ready access to shade, training crew bosses and providing written procedures spelling out essential steps to beat the heat.

If you go

WHAT: Heat-stress prevention seminar

WHEN: 3 p.m. today at the Fresno County Farm Bureau office, 1274 W. Hedges Ave., Fresno. A Spanish session begins at 1 p.m.

REGISTRATION: Nisei Farmers League office, (559) 251-8468 or Fresno County Farm Bureau office, (559) 237-0263.
http://www.mercedsunstar.com/167/story/340270.html

Maybe they can just offer the illegals training on how to cross the border safely while in desert areas during the sumer heat. We can't let them get heat stroke or anything while breaking our laws you know.

Or maybe they should offer gun safety training to illegal alien MS-13 members. After all we wouldn't want any of them to get hurt by not having proper firearm training.

Why not provide training to illegal alien ID forgery rings, you know those paper cuts can be brutal, not to mention the health risks of getting a finger stuck in a printer making up all those fake Social Security cards.