By Senator Crystal Brantley
Last week, I stood in the smoke-shadowed foothills near the Gila, watching the Hotshot crews return from another 16-hour shift fighting the Trout Fire. Faces were blackened, arms scraped, boots worn — but not one of them complained. They were focused, disciplined, and ready to do it again the next day.
These are the kinds of men and women who eat heat for breakfast. They are New Mexico's quiet heroes — firefighters, farmers, ranchers, oil field workers — doing hard jobs under hard conditions. They train for it, they plan for it, and they know how to take care of themselves and each other.
Recently, the New Mexico Environment Department proposed a new "heat illness prevention rule." The rule, as proposed, would require employers to create written heat safety plans, record heat-related symptoms and incidents, provide mandatory breaks, and document all compliance. It goes as far as inspection of each individual's daily water consumption, regardless of existing internal policies.
To be clear: the new "heat illness prevention" rule proposed by the Environment Department exempts emergency responders like wildland firefighters. That's the right call.
But what happens when the fire is out?
That's when construction workers arrive to rebuild. Municipal crews restore power and water. Highway workers clear debris, and teams scramble to shore up culverts and flood channels before the monsoon hits. Those folks—the men and women working on the secondary disaster—are covered under this rule. And they're already stretched thin.
These professionals don't need a government directive to tell them it's hot. They need flexibility. And they need the freedom to focus on the mission in front of them, not on daily logs and compliance forms that assume the worst of them.
In rural New Mexico, common sense is not a luxury. It's the only way things get done. Farmers plan around the sun. Ranchers adapt to the season. Oil field crews hydrate, rotate shifts, and protect their own—because losing a teammate to illness is catastrophic. The idea that a centralized agency knows better than the people doing the work is just plain wrong.
Let's be clear—safety matters. But regulation without realism backfires. This rule may sound good on paper, but in the real world, it threatens to sideline the very people who rebuild communities and maintain the systems that keep us safe.
It's one thing to offer guidance. It's another to handcuff heroes with a clipboard.
Let's call this what it is: micromanagement masquerading as public health. It needs to stop. Whether they're battling blazes, restoring power, or rebuilding roads, New Mexico's workforce deserves trust, not red tape.
Let heroes be heroes!
Senator Crystal Brantley represents District 35 in the New Mexico Senate which includes parts of Catron, Doña Ana, Grant, Hidalgo, Luna, Sierra & Socorro counties.
