At least 526 died in Clark County’s record summer heat in 2024

Winter may be in full swing in Clark County, but the coroner is not done tallying the carnage of the community’s record summer.

The latest update was released Wednesday and shows the death toll has risen to 526, up from the December total of 491. It’s still not a final number, the coroner’s office said, because the majority of death cases take up to 90 days to investigate.

That represents about a 70 percent increase from the 2024 number, which can somewhat be attributed to evolving standards around how the county decides whether heat was a factor in someone’s death.

“I think that is a reflection of the combination of drugs and heat,” Melanie Rouse, the Clark County coroner, said in a recent interview. “I think that is also a reflection of our office doing a better job accounting for those things and making sure that we’re classifying them correctly so the data can be easily abstracted.”

Largely a result of climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels, Las Vegas experienced a record summer in 2o24 compared with data that goes back to 1937. The average high temperature during the summer came in at 107.6 degrees, and one day in July even hit 120 degrees, the all-time record.

Last year, the Las Vegas Review-Journal investigated rising rates of heat-related deaths in “A fatal forecast,” a series dedicated to honoring those lost to increasing temperatures and exploring what local leaders can do to prevent more deaths as summers get hotter.

By the numbers

Analyzing the data of the 471 people who have been identified so far, risk factors such as addiction, homelessness and old age emerge as those that make otherwise healthy people susceptible to death as a result of heat.

The median age is 43 — a noticable decline from the last set of data that showed a median age of 59.

Part of the reason the age skews younger is because one of those who died was less than 1 year old. The primary cause of death was neonatal encephalopathy, a neurological syndrome caused by lack of oxygen to the baby during birth.

Of the 80 deaths of people age 40 or under, 74 were attributed at least in part to alcohol or drug use — something Rouse considers the greatest factor in heat deaths.

It’s not clear from the data how many of the dead may have been homeless, but experts say the cumulative toll of heat that homeless people experience throughout the day can be lethal.

“I think it’s important for people to think about the heat and take extra steps to ensure they stay well hydrated,” Rouse said. “If they come here and they are visitors, they may not be used to being out in the heat in the summer months.”

Organizations banding together to prevent death

Throughout Southern Nevada, organizations from the academic, public, private and nonprofit sectors continue to collaborate on solutions to extreme heat in both the short and long term.

The Desert Research Institute is home to the Southern Nevada Heat Resilience Lab, a research team that brings together local leaders throughout the summer to brainstorm. The group is working on extending availability to cooling centers, or air-conditioned areas where residents can escape the heat and cool down.

Efforts to boost tree canopy across the valley persist, too, with a goal of mitigating the urban heat island effect that makes some neighborhoods feel extreme heat more intensely.

“There’s no one weird trick to fix extreme heat,” lab coordinator Ariel Choinard previously said in an interview. “It takes time, and we’ll keep moving this work forward.”

Contact Alan Halaly at ahalaly@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AlanHalaly on X. Staff writer Estelle Atkinson contributed to this report.