Cooler states now forced to grapple with extreme heat fueled by climate change

One policy change Jane Gilbert, Miami-Dade’s heat officer, made was to lower the thresholds for heat advisories and warnings. The county now issues advisories when the heat index— what the temperature feels like to the human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature — reaches 105 degrees, down from the previous 108 degrees. The new standard for a heat warning is a heat index of 110 degrees, down from 113 degrees. She made the changes because heat-related illness can happen at the lower temperatures.

Gilbert also created an outreach strategy to help homeless people cope with extreme heat, including placing cooling centers in areas where there are many people living on the streets.

“We are doing a lot of great services to people who are unsheltered. That doesn’t mean we don’t miss people. We are doing a lot of messaging to employers with employees doing work, but that doesn’t mean we won’t miss people,” Gilbert said. “We know there are gaps. There is definitely more work to be done. That’s what we are focused on.”

Like Florida, Louisiana has long experience with extreme heat. But the state’s public health response still has to evolve with the warming planet, said Michelle Lackovic, who is the project lead for Louisiana’s Occupational Heat-Related Illness Prevention Program at the Louisiana Department of Health. Last year, she said, the state had more heat-related emergency department visits and fatalities than ever before.

Last summer the Louisiana Department of Health created a public, online dashboard for heat-related illness and daily counts of emergency room visits that it updates weekly during the hot months. The data is also broken down by sex, age, race and geography, so that the public can be aware of who may be most susceptible to the rising temperatures.

The state experienced over three weeks of temperatures above 95 degrees last year, Sundee Winder, an executive director at the health department, told Stateline.

“Drought, wildfires, saltwater intrusion, all of those things were a result of that extensive heat last year that was unprecedented for our state,” Winder told Stateline. “So, we continue to improve our dashboard, make it more user-friendly, and share the times of day that we see [people should] avoid.”