Summer 2024 has been Phoenix’s hottest ever. In spite of that, fewer people appear to have died as a result of heat in Maricopa County this year compared to last. If the numbers are confirmed, it would be the first year-over-year drop in heat-related deaths in a decade.
There have been 177 heat-related deaths confirmed in Maricopa County so far in 2024 and 436 others are under investigation, preliminary data from the county shows. That means the 2024 heat-related death toll in Maricopa County will still likely be one of the highest ever. But the numbers are about 12% lower than they were at the same point last year.
“It’s not time for a victory lap,” said David Hondula, director of Phoenix’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation. “While we are seeing positive signs in the numbers relative to last year, we still have a long way to go to see the really significant reductions that everyone is after.”
But, Hondula said, the apparent drop could be a sign that increased investments in heat relief and new strategies to protect vulnerable people from heat are beginning to move the needle in the right direction.
A major change in the city’s approach to heat relief this summer was to extend hours at three public cooling centers and to keep two others open overnight. The cooling centers launched in May and will remain open through the end of September. The city reports those five sites have had more than 20,000 visits so far. And more than 700 visitors to the sites have been referred to treatment or shelter. Hondula called the impact of the sites transformative.
“We’re talking about lives that have been changed,” Hondula said. “And we’re very confident that when we look at the data once it’s available at the end of the season, we’ll also be able to see that lives were saved from these locations.”
Hondula said his office also benefited this year from closer collaboration with Maricopa County and other municipalities.
When monsoon storms knocked out power to some neighborhoods in August, for example, Hondula said the city, county, and utilities worked together to quickly identify whether any cooling centers were impacted and to inform residents who had lost air conditioning about where they could go for heat relief.
“We were able to do that in a very coordinated fashion and very rapidly, in part, thanks to the new investments that have been made by so many of our partners and the city,” Hondula said.
Among those new investments this year was funding from Maricopa County for Arizona’s 211 helpline to increase the number of operators who could field heat-related questions. The county also allotted federal funding to pay for transportation services to get people who called 211 to cooling centers. And the county hired its first full-time countywide cooling center coordinator.
“I think we are headed in the right direction in terms of putting the resources there,” said Dr. Nick Staab, assistant medical director for Maricopa County Public Health. “This is the kind of operation that lasts so long that you really can't just stand it up real quickly and respond effectively. It does take dedicated personnel who are working on this all year long.”
The city and county’s investments in heat relief this year were pieced together from multiple sources including federal pandemic relief funding from the American Rescue Plan Act, which will run out in 2026. So Staab said heat relief efforts in future summers will depend on reliable funding.
“We know next summer is going to be hot and we're going to have the same issues and we need to be prepared to do this each summer,” Staab said.
Hondula and Staab both said they wanted to continue to analyze data to understand which heat relief strategies have been most effective this summer. And both said in future summers they want to see continued efforts to address homelessness and substance use, which are significant factors in heat deaths.
“All these deaths are preventable and so we just need to make sure that we're getting the right resources into the right communities,” Staab said. “Hopefully we can just continue to work on getting that number down.”
