How to write a California heat illness prevention plan
The five things a HIIP has to say, the mistakes that make one useless, and how to keep it current.
A California outdoor heat illness prevention plan is a working document, not a poster. T8 3395(h) requires it in writing, in English and in the language most of the crew reads, and available at the worksite. It has to answer five questions specifically enough that a new supervisor could run the site from it: how water gets there, when shade goes up, what happens at 95 F, who to call in an emergency, and how new workers are watched.
Takeaways
- Write a plan that names your actual procedures rather than restating the regulation.
- Get the five required elements in, in both languages your crew uses.
- Avoid the three failure modes that make a plan worthless during an inspection.
- Keep the plan current when the rules or your procedures change.
The five things the plan has to say
Specific enough to be useful
Three ways a plan fails in practice
Generating a draft and then owning it
Keeping the plan current
Frequently asked questions
- Does the plan have to be a separate document from my IIPP? No. The heat illness prevention procedures can be integrated into your Injury and Illness Prevention Program or kept as a separate document. Either way they have to be in writing and available at the worksite.
- Which language counts as the majority language? The language understood by the majority of your employees. If that is Spanish, the plan is required in English and Spanish. Crews with three languages are common, and providing all three is the safer practice.
- How long do I keep old versions? The rule does not set a retention period for superseded plans, but keeping them is valuable. If an incident happened in 2024, the version in effect in 2024 is the one that matters, not the one you rewrote afterward.
- Do I need a separate plan for each site? Not usually. One plan can cover multiple sites if the procedures genuinely apply to all of them. When a site is materially different, such as an indoor facility or one with no vehicle access, describe that difference in the plan.