Extreme heat is killing Italian workers
Stefano Olmastroni, a cleaner, had been tidying shelves in a supermarket selling farm produce in Florence shortly before he died on 13 July, when Italy was in the midst of an anticyclone called Cerberus that pushed temperatures beyond 40C.
Earlier in the day, the 61-year-old told relatives that he was struggling to work in the heat and was feeling sluggish. He was looking forward to resting on his day off the day after, The Guardian reported.
Olmastroni, who had heart problems, finished his shift at 3 p.m. and was later found slumped in the changing room.
“When they found him, the temperature in the changing room was 39C,” said his niece, Sara Ndere Olmastroni.
“He died before they could take him to the hospital.”
Her uncle had been working in the supermarket’s greenhouse area, where there was no air-conditioning.
“The temperature was really high and he was a person who had heart problems – a heart attack could have happened at any time but for sure, the heat didn’t help,” she added. “It was a horrible way to die – at work, and alone.”
Olmastroni is one of five people in Italy whose death over the past week is believed to have been provoked by the extreme heat as a more intense anticyclone, Caronte, broke a temperature record in Rome and nudged the mercury to almost 47C in Sicily. The true death toll is likely to be far greater.
All, apart from a 44-year-old road worker who died after collapsing while preparing fresh markings on a street in Milan and whose family is still awaiting the results of an autopsy, had heart-related health issues.
They include Ciro Adinolfi, 75, originally from Afragola near Naples, who died in front of his son, also a labourer, while operating a crane on the construction site of an Amazon warehouse in Jesi, in the central Marche region, and Gabriele Lucido, 64, from Salerno in the south, who was found dead in his lodgings after finishing his shift at a construction site in Brescia for TAV, the Italy-France high speed rail project.