Heat Regulations Are Getting More Complex. This Tool Puts the Answer in the Foreman's Hands.
Federal OSHA is moving toward a formal heat illness prevention standard. Several states - California, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado, Maryland, Nevada - already have their own rules in place. The frameworks reference heat index thresholds, acclimatization protocols, work/rest schedules, and hydration requirements. The guidance is grounded in NIOSH criteria and OSHA proposals that most safety professionals know exist but that almost nobody on the field side has actually read.
That's the gap this tool is designed to close.
The Heat Safe Plan is not a compliance checklist. It's a planning tool that translates the science and the regulatory frameworks into something a foreman can use at the start of a shift, in under two minutes, without needing to understand NIOSH heat-stress criteria to do it.
What It Does
The planner takes three primary inputs: job site location (city, state, or ZIP code for real-time weather data), crew size, and acclimatization level. That last one matters more than most people account for. New workers and workers returning after a week or more away from heat exposure need graduated exposure - roughly a 20% increase per day. The tool surfaces that context explicitly, because the acclimatization requirement is one of the most commonly missed elements in field-level heat planning.
You also set workload intensity - light, moderate, or heavy - and your shift start and end times. An optional state reference field pulls in relevant state-specific regulatory links for California, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Colorado, Maryland, and Nevada, or defaults to federal reference materials.
From those inputs, the planner generates a customized work/rest schedule with hydration recommendations, based on NIOSH heat-stress guidance and OSHA federal heat-rule proposals. The output is designed to be printed or displayed for the whole crew.
There's also a separate heat emergency reference page that covers signs, symptoms, and first-response protocols for heat cramps, heat exhaustion, and heat stroke - sourced from the National Safety Council, American Red Cross, CDC/NIOSH, and OSHA. That page exists for one reason: when someone goes down in the heat, the foreman needs to know what they're looking at and what to do, without searching for it.
Why Heat Index Instead of WBGT
The tool uses heat index rather than wet bulb globe temperature. This is a deliberate methodology choice, and it's worth explaining.
WBGT is the gold standard for industrial heat exposure assessment - it accounts for radiant heat, humidity, wind, and solar load in ways that heat index doesn't. If you're running a comprehensive industrial hygiene program with appropriate instrumentation, WBGT is the right measurement.
Most construction sites don't have that. They have a foreman with a phone checking weather at the start of the day. Heat index is accessible, widely understood, and based on the same real-time weather data that's already available on any device. For field-level planning tools designed for daily use by crew leads who aren't industrial hygienists, it's the right tradeoff.
The Larger Experiment
I want to be clear about what this tool is and isn't. It provides general heat-safety guidance. It is not legal advice, not site-specific professional guidance, and not a substitute for your company's heat illness prevention program. Every output needs to be reviewed and validated before field use. That disclaimer is on every page, because it's true.
What it is - and what I think matters more broadly - is an experiment in using technology to democratize safety knowledge that has historically lived behind paywalls, in regulatory documents, or in the heads of safety professionals who aren't always on site when decisions get made.
The person most likely to prevent a heat illness on a construction site is the foreman running the crew that day. Not the safety director sitting in an office. Not a consultant. The foreman. This tool is built for them. It's designed to put the right information in the right hands at the right moment - the beginning of a hot shift - without requiring any background in safety science to use it.
Heat is one of the most preventable causes of worker death in construction. The knowledge to prevent it exists. The regulatory frameworks are getting clearer. The gap is in access - getting that information to the people who need it, in a format they'll actually use.
That's what this is for.