Carissa Dutton brought a thermal gun to a concrete pour.
Garland’s deputy mayor pro tem spent part of July 29 on an active City of Garland Street Department job handing out popsicles and taking surface readings. A hard hat read 111 degrees. The concrete curing machine read 125. Freshly poured concrete read 131. She said afterward she’ll look at whether the city can budget more cooling equipment and water for outdoor crews.
What crews are doing without a rule
Street Department supervisor Daniel Amezcua described the practical program: ice chests on site, scheduled breaks, and concrete work rescheduled or started earlier in the day. City worker Romo Vega said hydration prep starts weeks before going out.
All of that is voluntary. That’s the point.
The federal standard that still isn’t finished
OSHA has been working on a heat injury and illness prevention standard for years. The Department of Labor’s 2026 regulatory plan puts a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking at December 2026, which means a final rule is realistically years out. Until then, heat enforcement runs through the General Duty Clause, Section 5(a)(1) of the OSH Act, which requires proof that a recognized hazard was causing or likely to cause death or serious harm.
General Duty citations are harder to write and easier to contest than citations under a specific standard. That’s why heat cases are rare relative to how many workers heat actually hurts.
Texas closed the local option
Austin and Dallas had both passed mandatory water-break ordinances for construction workers. Texas HB 2127, enacted in 2023, preempted them. So in the state with the largest construction workforce in the country, there is no enforceable minimum at the federal, state or municipal level. What’s left is what a given employer chooses to do.
Which makes Garland’s exercise more interesting than it first appears. A municipality measuring its own jobsites and then discussing a budget line for water and cooling is the only lever that survived the preemption: employers, including public ones, acting on their own.
Fall protection has been OSHA’s most-cited standard for more than 12 straight years, and the industry knows exactly what a fall costs. Heat has no comparable number because there’s no standard generating citations to count. The absence of data reads as an absence of a problem, right up until August.