Coming to work today, at 6:30am, I had to have the AC on in the car. The building is very humid due to the manufacturing process we do here, so it was sticky all day in the offices. Top it all off with a trip outside to where the construction contractors are working, drilling pilings, and trucks pounding the ground to powder.
Dirty, sticky, blow my nose and it's black type weather.
Part of my job is to monitor heat load on the production line workers. I use a fancy machine that looks like Spock and Wesley Crusher cobbled it together out of spare parts called a Wet Bulb Globe Thermometer. Basically, it measures the temperature, air movement, radiant heat, and humidity. It then figures out using some insane formula the heat load on people. At the peak, the plant will run (with production floor AC's running full blast) around 35C (95F), with 99% humidity.
Sweating doesn't help, because the air is saturated. Fans don't help, because your sweat just rolls off you instead of evaporating. We stop for 15 minutes of cool down every hour of work when it's like that.
Our new expansion is supposed to have a blast freezer unit on the roof to direct cold air to the most needed sections of the plant. The smaller AC units should be able to keep up then. Last year I had about 10 heat related injuries (mostly heat exhaustion). Here's hoping this new system will get rid of those 10.
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