MADRID, OCT 9 – Three hours into his shift as a street sweeper in Madrid on a summer evening with temperatures reaching 40 degrees Celsius, Jose Antonio Gonzalez passed out from heat stroke. He died the next day in hospital.
With warnings from the Spanish capital about a heat wave, the 60-year-old went to work in July 2022 with two bottles of water and a spray bottle to cool down.
“He knows he needs to stay hydrated. But that day, it was clearly not enough,” said Gonzalez’s son, Miguel Angel AFP.
Gonzalez had just started a month-long contract as a street sweeper. He usually works the colder morning shift but has changed shifts to help colleagues and starts at 2pm when temperatures are at their highest.
His death made headlines in the Spanish press about the threat posed by scorching temperatures, especially to outside workers and the more vulnerable.
On arrival at the Madrid emergency services where Gonzalez collapsed, they found his body temperature was 41.6 degrees Celsius.
They put ice on his neck and armpits to try to cool him, hydrated him with a saline solution and put him under a hypothermic blanket before taking him to hospital, a spokesman for Madrid’s emergency services said.
His liver and kidneys were already failing when his family arrived at his bedside and doctors gave them ‘no hope’, Miguel Angel said.
“The back of his body was purple as if he had been lying on the ground for a long time. He has a lot of stuff around him, like an ice shield and some fans. He was lying down with his eyes closed,” he said.
Gonzalez died on July 16, 2022. His death certificate said he suffered internal organ failure due to high body temperature. His death was classified as an accident at work.
“When the body temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius, the defense mechanism in the body that acts against heat such as sweating, will stop working,” said the spokesman of the Spanish Association of General and Family Physicians (SEMG), Lorenzo Armenteros del Olmo, to AFP.
In scorching temperatures, the body will push blood quickly to the skin where it can release heat, reducing flow to internal organs.
“It affects the whole body and that’s when the organs start to fail,” said Eduard Argudo, an intensive care doctor at the Vall d’Hebron hospital in Barcelona, adding that prompt medical treatment is the key to avoid irreversible organ failure.
“Sometimes organ damage has become so severe that even when we manage to control the temperature, we cannot restore it,” he said AFP.
“Heat stroke is a medical emergency incident and these patients need immediate intensive care,” he added, warning that it has a high mortality rate.
With warmer weather following climate change becoming more common in the coming year, this dangerous situation seems to be increasing.
Gonzalez once complained to Miguel Angel a few days before he died, “I find it difficult to speak because I feel too hot” when he met Gonzalez at the train station on his way home from work.
“When he (Gonzalez) comes home, after greeting, the first thing he will do is go to the swimming pool to cool off,” added his son.
Gonzalez’s death shocked Spaniards and prompted Madrid city hall to take steps to stop outdoor work during the heat wave and avoid working during the hottest hours of the day.
Miguel Angel added that after his father died, he once saw on the computer that his father had done a Google search: “What to do about heat stroke”. – AFP
