Overview:
A new Los Angeles County dashboard tracks illnesses and deaths linked to extreme heat, helping officials better understand a threat that disproportionately harms Black communities. Researchers say heat-related deaths are often undercounted, masking the effects of decades of redlining and disinvestment.
Every summer, as Southern California bakes under triple-digit heat, residents in historically Black, typically underserved neighborhoods like Watts, Compton, and Inglewood bear a disproportionate share of the suffering — and, too often, the dying — from temperatures that don’t fall when the sun goes down.
Yet if an elderly Black resident in South Los Angeles dies alone in a sweltering apartment, the official death certificate may say kidney failure. It probably won’t say heat.
LEARN MORE: New Proof a Federal Heat Rule Could Save Black Workers’ Lives
That’s about to change in Greater Los Angeles. Officials have unveiled a new way to track the most dangerous effects of heat: an online dashboard that shows how many people get sick or die from extreme heat.
Dangerous Heatwaves
The LA County Department of Public Health developed the Heat-Related Illness and Mortality Dashboard to track illnesses and deaths from heat exposure. The site, which launched earlier this month, will help the health department, its partners, and communities better understand the health consequences of extreme heat.
The new dashboard will give a snapshot sense of how heatwaves are affecting public health across the vast county.
This dashboard gives us timely, local insight into who is most affected and where, helping [LA County] Public Health and our partners take targeted action.
Barbara Ferrer, LA County Department of Public Health
Barbara Ferrer, the department’s director, said in a press release that the dashboard can help prevent deaths among vulnerable residents.
“Extreme heat is becoming more frequent and severe, making heat-related illness an increasing concern, especially for older adults, young children, outdoor workers, and people with underlying health conditions,” she said. “This dashboard gives us timely, local insight into who is most affected and where, helping Public Health and our partners take targeted action.”
Undercounting Heat Deaths
Officials say the dashboard will feature heat-related emergency room visits and deaths by month, along with race and other demographic information. But the mortality rate will be based on death certificates.
That could be a concern: although it’s been widely established that heat can be fatal, deaths during heatwaves are often attributed to other causes, such as cardiac arrest, despite the fact that extreme heat events can trigger or exacerbate underlying health conditions.
In an interview with Governing magazine, Dr. Bharat Venkat, director of the UCLA Heat Lab, explained that relying on death certificate data risks undercounting heat-related mortality.
“Heat piggybacks off of preexisting health conditions,” Venkat said. “Say you go to the ER and you’re experiencing an intense psychotic episode, or a heart attack or a stroke. It’s very likely that the doctor is going to diagnose that as a psychotic episode, heart attack or stroke, and less likely that they’ll note that heat is contributing to that.”
Even though the Los Angeles area consistently records high summer temperatures, there hasn’t been much research on the effects of extreme heat on the nearly 10 million people who live there. But it’s clear that Black people and communities are especially at risk for heat fatalities.
Risk Disparities
Decades of underinvestment in Black neighborhoods, fomented by redlining, have resulted in a lack of cooling green spaces with tree canopies and an abundance of heat-absorbing surfaces such as asphalt.
A 2024 study in the journal Public Health, which analyzed weather and mortality data, found that about 200 people die annually from extreme heat. Most are among the area’s most vulnerable populations, including the unhoused; in metro Los Angeles, about a third of the homeless population is Black.
RELATED: Working While Black — and in the Heat
By comparison, Los Angeles County’s Black population sits at around 8%.
During the city’s so-called heat season, which runs from May through October, the dashboard will track heat-related emergency-room visits alongside the day’s high temperature in downtown LA. Having an immediate sense of how heat is affecting residents, Ferrer said, will make it easier to respond quickly.
