Two months ago, Baltimore’s inspector general received a complaint about how Baltimore’s Department of Public Works provided inadequate water, ice and fans to workers who labor in abysmal conditions. In the following weeks, the IG issued multiple reports — with photographic documentation — warning of the serious risk to employee health and singling out solid waste workers. One week ago Friday, 36-year-old Ronald Silver II, who had been collecting trash on a day when temperatures broke the 100-degree mark, collapsed on a door stoop begging for water and died of hyperthermia. These circumstances strongly suggest his death was avoidable.

Whatever explanations Mayor Brandon Scott or his acting DPW director care to offer — including insufficient funding for the agency’s facilities going back decades — are woefully inadequate for the moment. Does Baltimore have millions of dollars sitting around to replace trash trucks that lack air conditioning or build entirely new solid waste facilities with air conditioning and working water fountains? Perhaps not. But given this clear warning from IG Isabel Mercedes Cumming, it would not have been at all unreasonable for Khalil Zaied or his underlings to personally hand out chilled water bottles, bags of ice and Gatorade in Cherry Hill or elsewhere each morning. Workers like Silver earn in the neighborhood of $42,500 a year. The cost of a 24-pack of bottled water at Royal Farms? That would be $7.99. Oh, and maybe the top brass should have been out there teaching supervisors and their crews to be aware of dangerous symptoms, especially in a summer of record heat.

And let’s underscore that last point. Not only did city officials have the IG’s warning, they had the weatherman’s as well. The day of Silver’s death had already been predicted to be abnormally high. Given the humidity, the National Weather Service had predicted a heat index reaching 110 degrees. City Hall was wise enough to call off trash collection on Friday, Aug. 9, because of rain. Why so little interest in calling it off for a climate change-enabled heatwave?

This isn’t just about the weather, although heat-related deaths are clearly rising across the United States, growing from 1,602 in 2021 to 2,302 last year, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The Maryland Department of Health has reported 18 such deaths across the state as of Aug. 3, the highest in four years. Climate change is likely to continue pushing that statistic in the wrong direction. Nor is it only about the toxic culture within the DPW as confirmed by representatives of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 3, the union representing sanitation workers at a news conference Tuesday. Whatever training was provided to sanitation workers on their day off from their rounds, we can only hope it will be helpful. Unanswered questions remain: Why weren’t the IG’s warnings taken more seriously? Why wasn’t the training offered before Silver’s death? Why wasn’t everyone at City Hall much more frightened by this real possibility?

We understand that bad things happen sometimes. People can have underlying medical conditions. EMS teams are at times slow to respond to emergencies. And, as Mayor Scott has observed, the agency is underfunded, and investigations of Silver’s death, including the one Gov. Wes Moore endorsed this past week, may assign blame more precisely. We are also hopeful that long-awaited state regulations meant to protect workers in scorching weather — a whopping four years since state lawmakers first called for their creation — are forthcoming. But in the meantime, let this be an example of a danger that should not be ignored or taken lightly, particularly for those who labor outdoors. Heat exhaustion, heat stroke, worsened asthma or COPD, blood pressure problems and kidney damage all are a heightened risk in hot weather, especially for young children and older adults.

The extreme heat safety warning has been given. Is everyone listening now?