Montse Aguilar was a healthy 51-year-old woman when she started her shift cleaning streets in Barcelona at around 2:30 p.m. on June 28. The Spanish city was under alert for high temperatures amid a brutal heat wave that brought record temperatures for that time of the year across the country. She was responsible for sweeping one of the hottest, dirtiest and more touristic areas — the Raval district.

At the end of the shift, at around 9:30 p.m., she walked back home and asked her elderly mother to prepare dinner because she wasn’t feeling well. She also messaged a friend and told him she felt cramps in her arms, chest and neck, her brother-in-law Manuel Ceacero told Bloomberg Green.

Some time before 11 p.m., Aguilar dropped dead in her apartment.

“She had called my wife that afternoon saying it was impossible to work with those levels of heat,”…

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