Quick Take
As a heat wave gripped the region, Lookout journalists spoke with workers from Santa Cruz to Capitola to Watsonville about how they were getting through it, shift by shift.
Santa Cruz County rarely does heat like this.
For a stretch of days this week, temperatures pushed into the 90s and touched triple digits in some spots.
But the county kept moving. Security guards walked their beats, road crews poured concrete, farmers adjusted their harvest schedules around the hottest hours and business owners scrambled to keep food and beer cold when the heat knocked out their power.
This is a look at how some of them got through it, shift by shift. A security officer decided his vest could wait. A paving crew leaned on water breaks and each other. A construction worker two weeks into a new job called it the hottest he’s ever worked in Santa Cruz. A Pajaro Valley grower raced to irrigate his fields before the worst of the hot weather hit. And in Capitola Village, a business owner kept pouring beer and grilling sausages after power went out.
Steven Pokriefka typically spends 12 hours outside daily, walking along the Front Street corridor for his job as a contract security manager for PalAmerican, which provides security for Santa Cruz Metro.
“Usually it’s like mid-70s to 80 in Santa Cruz, after that it’s like, all right, this is San Jose weather,” said Pokriefka, who used to live in San Jose.
There’s not a ton Pokriefka could do to escape Wednesday’s scorcher aside from seeking out the shady areas of the street when possible.
“But if there’s a call, I still might have to run from here up to Wells Fargo,” he said. “And from time to time, if we have a call that requires us to go talk to the customer service reps, we pop in there and it’s air-conditioned.”
Although it was less hot on Thursday, Pokriefka decided to ditch the vest he wore Wednesday to keep his clothing light. The same, however, cannot be said for his colleague, security officer Antonio Calderon. He luckily didn’t work on Wednesday, but unfortunately forgot his uniform shirt on Thursday and had no choice but to wear the jacket. “A little warm, but doing good so far,” he said.
But when asked if he wished he brought his uniform, the answer was clear: “Oh, for sure.”
– Max Chun
Deeper into downtown, right outside Bookshop Santa Cruz, George Oakley sat on a ledge under the shade of trees around noon and played his transverse flute — the same way he spends most of his days. He did the same thing on Wednesday, but for him, the heat was largely bearable. He spent many of his younger years in Maryland, where high heat is coupled with high humidity.
“Yesterday, if you were in the shade, your sweat would evaporate and you’d dry off,” he said. “In Maryland and D.C., you might as well be in Mississippi.”
Even so, he spent less time downtown than usual on Wednesday, largely because no one was out and about. He ended up hanging out at the wharf in the evening, when people actually felt they could leave home.
“It’s almost too chilly there most of the time, but yesterday, it was perfect,” he said.
In fact, Oakley said that more normal summer weather in Santa Cruz is comforting and even nostalgic to him, despite the difference in climate to his former home back east.
“When I’m here, and it’s not hot like it was yesterday, but a more regular day, it reminds me of a beautiful fall day in early October in D.C.,” he said.
— Max Chun
Jose Gaona, who works for the City of Santa Cruz, said his crew was posted up on Locust Street repaving concrete Wednesday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.
“As soon as 8 a.m. hit, it was really hot,” Gaona said.
His crew had packed a jug with water, Gatorade, hydration packets and ice, but accidentally forgot it before starting their job Thursday.
Still, Gaona said his site managers take care of the workers.
“They’re looking out for us, making sure we’re drinking enough water, giving us extra water breaks if we need it,” Gaona said. “We look out for each other, too. So if the guys start getting tired or they’re looking a little woozy, you know, ‘Take a break. Let me jump in.’”
“Thank god for the union,” his coworker joked.
Gaona has worked for the city for three years, but said this is the hottest it’s gotten for him on the job. When his crew works with asphalt, they try to finish the job by 11 a.m. at the latest, as the material heats up under the sun. Thursday’s job with concrete was a little more bearable, despite temperatures hovering around 90 degrees.
Cirilo Hernandez, who works for Ciarra Construction, said he worked in near-100-degree weather for eight hours Wednesday while constructing walls and joists for the new library building downtown.
He spent most of Wednesday in the sun, which resulted in a safety glasses tan, he laughed. Hernandez also said his crew was allowed to take four breaks instead of their usual two to combat fatigue.
“We take precautions,” Hernandez said. “If it’s too hot, we go to the shade.”
Hernandez said he’s worked on hotter days up in Calistoga, but as of his two-week tenure with Ciarra Construction in Santa Cruz, this has been a record high.
“This is my second week. I’m fresh,” Hernandez said. “Lately, it’s been getting hot, but the weather here is normally good. It’s not too many days of this.”
— Alia Yee Noll
Jimmy Walters, who spent most of Thursday morning along River Street by Trader Joe’s, said he’s noticed more extreme weather in the past few years in Santa Cruz.
“I’m homeless here. I stay outside most of the time, so I’m out here in the heat probably the majority of the time, but usually it’s a different kind of heat,” Walters told Lookout. “Yesterday was really dry. I wouldn’t say it was one of the worst days we’ve had. We’ve had hotter days, but we had to hydrate quite a bit.”
The weather has ranged from heat waves like this to below-freezing winters, he said.
“I think it was maybe eight, nine months ago that supposedly it got cold enough here that someone actually died from hypothermia, but I can’t confirm that,” Walters said. “In my own opinion, there have been some nights here where it got definitely cold enough to get hypothermia.”
After growing up between Sacramento and Alabama, Walters is used to this kind of dry heat, but didn’t expect it in Santa Cruz.
“It’s just strange, extreme temperatures here in Santa Cruz,” Walters said. “Most of the time that I’ve lived here, it’s been pretty consistent. You can usually wear a hoodie all year round, and it doesn’t bother you.”
Walters said he wasn’t able to sleep the previous night after spending the majority of the week sick, but the heat wave provided a surprising shift from the usually cold nights.
“It was really warm, and it was kind of nice, actually. I was able to still be out and about and not have to wear a hoodie or jacket or anything,” he said. “It was a big difference from what we were having a year ago. Before it was raining and cold, and now it’s really warm at night. The seasons are definitely sporadic now and changing drastically quite a bit.”
— Alia Yee Noll and Kevin Painchaud
Farmers in the Pajaro Valley said they are experiencing one of the warmest weeks of the growing season, with temperatures in Watsonville in the 90s.
Growers like Lakeside Organics owner Dick Peixoto prepared for the hot temperatures by irrigating their crops — a common practice for farmers — to ensure that they can survive the heat.
Peixoto, who primarily grows vegetables like spinach, lettuce and turnips, said he and his team began to irrigate all 53 of their organic fields last Saturday to ensure their crops would not be affected by this week’s hot weather.
Because of the high temperatures, Lakeside employees are given the opportunity to start their work day earlier, with the goal of ending their shift in the early afternoon, he said. At each worksite, there are shade covers and water available for when they need to take breaks throughout the day. Supervisors are also trained to keep an eye out for employees who seem to have symptoms of heat exhaustion.
“A lot of times they come in earlier and try to leave earlier, just before it gets too hot. We completely leave it up to them,” Peixoto said.
Due to these small changes in shifts, Peixoto added that Lakeside Organics has had to prioritize the “more tender crops,” like spinach and lettuce, picking them first thing in the morning and harvesting root vegetables later in the day.
“Each crop gets treated a little differently,” he said. “We have to prioritize where we go in the morning and what crops to harvest and what crops to harvest in the afternoon.”
— Tania Ortiz
When BrewTopia lost power in Capitola Village on Wednesday afternoon, a live musician in the courtyard near the Esplanade played on.
“All the speakers are battery-powered, so we joked that we could keep playing music and pouring beer,” said owner Josh Fisher.
But the heat could have been a big problem at the taphouse. Without power, the kegs would slowly warm and become too foamy to pour through the draft lines. Without refrigeration, the beer would eventually spoil, and, like most businesses in the village, Fisher doesn’t have a generator.
Fisher also owns nearby Left Coast Sausage Worx and manages the Mercantile Arcade, which had to close since it couldn’t operate games or run payments. At Left Coast, his employee was able to fulfill orders of loaded hot dogs and sausages using the gas range. The business was also able to receive payments through its POS system while offline, although they couldn’t tell if transactions went through until the power came back on.
He also had to close the two parking lots near his businesses that he manages because the kiosks couldn’t receive payments. For two hours, Fisher had to manually raise the gates each time a car exited.
“It’s lost revenue all around — parking, arcade, food, beer, and customers,” said Fisher.
Pacific Gas & Electric restored power after about two hours, but with more hot weather in store Thursday, Fisher was hoping there wouldn’t be another outage as he prepares for the Capitola Art & Wine Festival this weekend.
On Thursday afternoon, he was stocking up on sausages from Corralitos Market & Sausage Co. and craft beer.
“I’m really hoping that this doesn’t happen again as we prepare for the biggest weekend of the whole year,” he said.
– Lily Belli
Karin Campbell, who teaches second grade at Mintie White Elementary in Watsonville, said this wasn’t the first time she, like many teachers across the county who don’t have air-conditioned classrooms, struggled to teach students during a heat wave.
“This happens every year,” she said. “This is extremely frustrating – we have been asking for air conditioning since before I started teaching here [about seven years ago].”
Campbell said she had five fans running in her classroom this week with the door open and all her windows open, but still her classroom was 81 degrees.
“It was unbearable,” she said. “Kids could not think. Kids could not learn. I had kids falling asleep because they were so overheated.”
Brandon Diniz, the Pajaro Valley Unified School District’s teachers union president, told Lookout that he didn’t have the data on which classrooms have air conditioning across the district, but many don’t, and the ones that do don’t have control over the thermostat. He said the district controls the thermostats but sometimes the systems aren’t programmed according to the weather and are blowing hot air on warm days.
PVUSD spokesperson Alejandro Chavez couldn’t be reached for comment.
Campbell said she and some teachers are concerned that PVUSD hasn’t moved forward with using bond money to install air conditioning because it’s still analyzing which schools it might need to close. The district is researching and exploring which schools it needs to close in light of significant declining enrollment in recent years and the need to reduce costs.
“I feel like the message we’re getting is like we can’t even do anything about it anyway because who knows what schools are going to be closed,” said Campbell. “[Air conditioning] is something that should have happened, like at least a decade ago.”
– Hillary Ojeda
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