Sample chapter · open
This is chapter 2.6 of the SAFE programme, exactly as a crew reads it — same text, same diagram, nothing added for the website.
In this region heat is not weather. It is a workplace hazard with its own season, its own rules and its own way of killing people, and it deserves a chapter of its own.
Working in the sun, your body tries to cool itself by sweating. Sweat costs water and salt. When you lose more than you drink, the blood thickens, the heart works harder, and the first thing that goes is judgement — before you feel seriously unwell, you are already making worse decisions.
That is the part people miss. Heat does not begin with collapse. It begins with a man who is slower, clumsier and less careful than he was an hour ago, and who does not notice it about himself.
Across the Gulf, work in direct sun is restricted through the hottest part of the summer, and the exact dates and hours differ by country. Those are in the figure above, and they change from time to time — check the current year with your employer.
Some work is exempt because it cannot be interrupted: asphalt laying, concrete pouring, emergency repairs. Note the irony worth remembering — the exempt jobs are usually the hottest ones of all, which is exactly why the other protections matter more there, not less.
The employer must provide shade for rest, cooling equipment such as fans, drinking water in sufficient quantity, and salt replacement. Where the work is outdoors, heat stress training and a documented acclimatisation plan for new arrivals are part of the requirements.
Your side is simpler and harder. Drink before you are thirsty, because thirst arrives late. Take the breaks you are given, in the shade, not in the sun with your back to it. Watch the newcomer, who has not acclimatised and will not admit it. And say something the moment a colleague stops sweating, stops talking or starts talking strangely.
From practice. A man who had arrived from a cool country ten days earlier kept up with the crew all morning to show he could. By noon he had stopped sweating — the sign everyone missed — and by the time he sat down he could not stand up again. He recovered. Men in the same situation have not.
I will drink at the break, there is an hour to go and I am not thirsty yet.
I drink now and keep drinking through the shift. By the time thirst arrives, the loss has already happened.
The one thing to take away: heat takes your judgement before it takes your legs, which is why the man who feels fine is not evidence that the crew is fine.
Because it is the one that separates a programme written for this region from a programme translated into it. Everything else on the page is a claim; this is the evidence.
The other thirty-one are the same length and built the same way. Five modules, three industry editions, English and Arabic, a knowledge check after every module.