Heat kills hundreds of Nevadans yearly. Are officals behind in adapting?

Despite extreme heat claiming more lives in the Las Vegas Valley than any weather event, officials have fallen behind in helping the region adapt, attendees of the first Southern Nevada Heat Summit said Wednesday.

They pointed to what they described as a fractured approach across local governments and a lack of sustainable funding.

For officials like Cheryl Nagy at the Clark County Office of Emergency Management, responding to dangerously hot temperatures has not traditionally been part of the job description.

But just before the Fourth of July last year, a gusty storm knocked down miles of power lines in southeast Las Vegas, leaving about 30,000 customers without power for air conditioning in the hottest month of the year. Nagy, the office’s preparedness and recovery coordinator, got word of a senior living facility where about 150 apartments were getting hotter by the minute.

County officials transported those residents to the Las Vegas Convention Center that day, saving lives.

“We just looked at each other and went: ‘This is serious,’ ” Nagy said. “These people probably would have passed away.”

Nagy spoke at the Regional Transportation Commission’s summit Wednesday at the AC Hotel Las Vegas Symphony Park, which hosted about 200 attendees. Nonprofit leaders, government employees, elected officials and researchers shared their visions for a more resilient Las Vegas Valley in the face of climate change.

Last week, Reno and Las Vegas again topped the list of the nation’s fastest-warming cities in a nonprofit’s annual Earth Day analysis of warming since 1970.

Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom said in an interview that hot summers were always a given growing up in Southern Nevada. Asked about the newfound attention officials are paying to the extreme heat, Segerblom said the summer of 2024 was a wake-up call.

Marking the deadliest heat season on record for Southern Nevada, heat played a role in the deaths of 527 people that year; in 2025, that number was nearly 280. While those figures are likely an undercount, the Clark County coroner’s office widened its criteria in 2021 for when investigators consider heat as a cause of death.

“I do think we could do more, and that’s the purpose of this summit,” Segerblom said.

Does Nevada need heat office?

Some officials said Nevada has been slow to acknowledge extreme heat as a public health emergency.

To date, the only official response to extreme heat is the activation of a few dozen so-called “cooling centers” that open their doors for the community. That usually only happens when the National Weather Service issues a heat warning.

The other long-term adaptation measure is bolstering the valley’s tree canopy, which a patchwork of nonprofits and local governments are working on doing in the hottest neighborhoods. Marci Henson, director of Clark County’s Department of Environment and Sustainability, said Southern Nevada is just getting started.

“Because there’s no single entity that’s responsible, our regional coordination is in its infancy,” Henson said. “But there’s a lot of work being done. I think that’s evidenced by all the people that are here today.”

On Wednesday, Nevada Assemblymember Cinthia Moore, D-North Las Vegas, reiterated her commitment to introducing a bill in 2027 to create a statewide heat office. For roughly three years, the Nevada Heat Lab at the Desert Research Institute has filled that role, acting as an incubator for ideas on how to better respond.

Moore called Assembly Bill 96 — the law that requires all cities with more than 100,000 residents to incorporate extreme heat adaptation into master planning this year — a step in the right direction. But having a paid expert with a wide-lens view on the issue is what the state is missing, she said.

“There’s really no one in the region that owns extreme heat or is responsible for an emergency plan on how it is that we approach that,” Moore said. “There’s also a lack of public education.”

Maricopa County as model

Las Vegas is often compared to Phoenix, Arizona, for its intensity of heat in a pavement-dense desert city.

Two speakers at Wednesday’s summit were David Hondula, the city of Phoenix’s director of heat response, and Lilliana Cardenas of the Maricopa County Department of Public Health. Both emphasized that their presence did not imply Clark County must follow Arizona’s exact structure.

Cardenas spoke of the success of its Heat Relief Network, a slew of businesses, city buildings and more where people can go to cool off. They differentiate between hydration stations, cooling centers and respite centers — the latter of which is stocked with mats so people can lie down in a cooled space.

Some of the centers have emergency medical personnel, though that isn’t widespread, Hondula said.

According to the Arizona Republic, other unique tactics Arizona officials employ include providing first responders with ice and human-sized bags that they use to immerse people exhibiting symptoms of heat stroke in cold water, as well as outreach in mobile home communities.

To be a part of the relief network, facility hours must extend into the early evening, Cardenas said.

Hondula said extreme heat planning is required year-round to ensure actions the government takes are intentional and targeted to those who need relief most.

“These aren’t quick switches,” Hondula said. “These are big, heavy, slow switches that we’re moving January and February.”

Nevada State Sen. Dina Neal, D-North Las Vegas, said she believes getting local governments to participate in heat mitigation across the valley is like “herding cats.” Often, passing legislation is the only way to get hesitant governing bodies, some with members who do not believe in climate change, to act, Neal said.

“Political will is mandatory; consistent political will to do the act over and over and over again,” Neal said.

RTC commits to two-year study

At the end of the event, RTC announced it will begin identifying ways the region can make transit systems more resilient to extreme weather. The Transportation Resilience Improvement Plan, or “Let’s Go Prepared” campaign, is the result of a $750,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration.

The agency has led the way in collecting data on extreme heat, publishing a valleywide analysis in 2022 of the “urban heat island effect,” where a lack of green spaces and heat-trapping asphalt makes certain neighborhoods hotter.

Over the course of two years, the agency will hire experts to craft a regional heat response plan, said Andrew Kjellman, RTC’s deputy chief executive officer, in an interview.

“When the plan is done, we will have a good playbook and run of show that we can all follow,” Kjellman said, adding that it could direct shade over bus stops or backup power generation for buses. “We will all know what each partner is doing during these extreme heat events.”

The results will help RTC officials prioritize future projects, Kjellman said. Funding remains a challenge for extreme heat work; even though some $50 million over five years has been dedicated toward shade structures, only about half of the RTC’s 3,700 bus stops have them, he said.

“We have the gaps identified: the needs, the points of failure,” Kjellman said. “But then it’s getting those resources to help address them. The ultimate outcome is lives saved and a growing, thriving regional economy.”