Global warming is real and it’s starting to impact some aspects of everyday life. Take package deliveries. Drivers are facing record heat to get people their things on time, but without air-conditioning in their trucks it’s proving to be dangerous, as one Texas UPS driver recently found out.
Dallas-Fort Worth Fox 4 reports that a UPS driver passed out from the heat over the weekend while behind the wheel of his UPS package car. The area is currently under an excessive heat warning and temperatures have reached dangerous levels for those who mostly work outside.
On August 18, driver Henry Huynh captured footage of the UPS van barreling down the Sam Rayburn highway. Huynh spoke with FOX 4 about what he saw:
The car just kept going left, left, left and then once that red car comes passing him I’m like, oh you know, this is serious. And once boom he hits the tree, I’m like this is serious,” said Henry Huynh who took the video.
Huynh told Fox that once the truck hit the tree, he looked over and saw that the driver was unconscious. Authorities investigating the incident wouldn’t confirm anything, but only said that there a medical incident occurred and the UPS driver was taken to a local hospital.
A short time later, David Reeves, the President and Principal Officer for the Teamsters Local 767 Union that represents UPS drivers, confirmed that the driver had suffered from a heat-related illness. Reeves called what happened dangerous and unacceptable.
This could have been a very dangerous situation for the driver along with the general public. The issue we have is once one of our drivers explains to the company that they have severe heat-related injuries, they need to be shut down for the day. This is unacceptable.
In a statement to Fox 4, UPS said it’s working with authorities and investigating the incident. The driver reportedly informed his managers at UPS he wasn’t feeling well before the crash occurred. The company dodged one of the biggest questions of all: Was the driver required to continue driving even after telling the company that they felt ill?
Dangerous conditions in UPS trucks have been an issue for the last few years and UPS has been dragging its feet. Back in ’22, the company essentially said it wasn’t going to install air conditioning units in trucks. A contract negotiation a year later brought what looked like a win between the company and the Teamsters when the company agreed to buy new trucks with cooling units However, a year later the company hasn’t purchased a single one.
UPS claims over 200,000 fans have been installed in trucks, but it failed to mention that those fans only come after individual driver requests — and I say that as a former UPS employee. UPS drivers also aren’t the only ones who have it bad. Postal service workers have been going through the same thing, with some even claiming that managers are denying them air conditioning for their mail trucks.
In the American South, in our overheated climate, air conditioners are as non-negotiable as heaters are for Northern drivers in the winter. Driving while suffering from heat exhaustion can have real consequences. Just last a week, a driver in the process of dying from heat exhaustion got into his car and, in his confusion, drove off a cliff. He later died due to the heat, not the crash.