States warming to heat standards
Spring may have just sprung, but NAPA members are already looking toward how they will keep workers safe from heat illness this summer.
NAPA Vice President for Environment, Health, and Safety Howard Marks led a discussion on heat illness prevention as part of the second day of education sessions at the People, Plants, and Paving Conference co-located with the 2025 World of Asphalt. The session, Implementing a Heat Illness Prevention Plan for Road Construction Workers, centered on NAPA resources for companies to develop their own heat illness prevention plans. While OSHA proposed rulemaking aimed at developing a federal heat standard in 2024, Marks said the future of OSHA’s heat illness prevention policies is less than certain, although there is a virtual public hearing on the proposed rule scheduled for June 16.
In the interim and likely until federal OSHA issues any further rulemaking, six states have already established their own heat standards: California, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington. According to the Coalition for Workplace Safety, if OSHA were to move forward with its heat standard, policies in those half-dozen states would stay in place so long as they are found to offer at least equal protection.
Colorado, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Texas, however, fall under the federal OSHA jurisdiction, meaning if their proposed standards were enacted, an implemented OSHA standard would void them. Utah had a proposed state heat standard that ultimately did not become law, while there is a bill introduced in the Arizona legislature in February that seeks to establish standards in the Grand Canyon State. And Maryland introduced and finalized its own standard that appears problematic to implement.
Regardless, and given state and federal interest to minimize heat illness across outdoor workers, we encourage each company to review NAPA’s resources, and compare to any currently-issued state Standard. For those states that do not yet have their own Standard, our due diligence indicated NAPA’s resource guide would meet OSHA’s still current National Emphasis Program. NAPA will continue to monitor the evolution of federal and state heat illness rulemaking.
