Barcelona Buys 750 Heat Wristbands a Year After 17 Summer Alerts
Barcelona's parks agency will buy 750 heat wristbands a year for outdoor staff after the devices went off 17 times last summer. Delivery is due in May.
Barcelona’s municipal parks agency plans to buy 750 heat-sensing wristbands a year for the next two years, after the devices it tested last summer went off 17 times on gardeners whose body temperature was climbing toward a dangerous level, El Periódico reported.
The new batch is due in May, and the Ajuntament de Barcelona (Barcelona City Council) says it will reach more of the staff who work outdoors.
How the wristbands worked last summer
Each band tracks the body temperature of the person wearing it and triggers when it rises to an abnormal level. The wearer gets a vibration, a sound and a light signal.
The council handed sensors to street-level staff in cleaning, street lighting and gardening, and to Siresa, the company that runs the city’s recycling points (puntos verdes). Of those, 500 went to the Institut Municipal de Parcs i Jardins (the city’s parks and gardens agency). The trial followed the death in 2025 of a member of a street-cleaning crew during a heat wave.
According to the council, the 17 alerts warned workers early enough for them to rest and drink water. Sílvia Fitó, who chairs the works council at Parcs i Jardins and leads the CCOO union there, told El Periódico that the affected workers cooled down, recovered and went back to work. “We rate it very positively,” she said.
Why new bands are needed every year
The wristbands cannot be recharged. Once one is put into use it lasts about five months, so the council says they have to be renewed each season. Part of the new order replaces the bands first used this year.
Fitó said some of last summer’s stock was never activated and does not expire until it is. She added that the union won one of its demands: people employed through Barcelona Activa job schemes will get the device too.
What it means for outdoor workers
For gardeners and other council staff who spend the summer on the street, the order turns a trial into regular equipment and widens the group that receives it. Delivery in May is timed, in the council’s words, to the start of the hottest period.
The unions accepted the wristbands last summer and complained about other gaps in heat protection at the same time. Their main grievance was air conditioning in the Parcs i Jardins fleet. After a complaint by the CGT union, Inspecció de Treball (the Catalan labor inspectorate) found that 105 of the agency’s vehicles had none and ordered the problem fixed.
The vehicle fleet is still a dispute
Fitó said the plan to fit air conditioning in the older vehicles appears to be finished, and she expects all of them to have it by next summer. New vehicles are another matter. They depend on council money for an investment plan that, she said, has not arrived.
A recent CCOO audit counted 92 vehicles that have been in service for 10 years or more and 73 that are more than 15 years old. Fitó told the newspaper that the files are ready, but tendering takes time and cannot be sped up, so without funding the replacements will not come next year. She described a very old fleet with safety problems, including brakes in some cases.
Source: El Periódico
