Hot air wafted through the heavy, gold-lined doors of a Las Vegas casino as they opened, offering a reminder of a disaster quietly unfolding outside. Even though the sun had just set on an evening in mid-July, temperatures were yet to dip below 100F (37C).

Spawned from a paved-over oasis in the Mojave, this desert metropolis has always been hot. But a string of brutal heatwaves this summer has pushed Sin City to a deadly simmer.

It’s hard to tell from inside the cool, cavernous buildings that line the Las Vegas Strip, which have become unwitting refuges from the summer elements. Tourists willing to enter labyrinths of slot machines and blaring pop music, shops and shows can spend hours lost in an alternate world, away from the sun.

For the 2.3 million people who call this valley home, the dangerous elements are harder to ignore. When temperatures climb, shadeless streets are hot enough to cause second-degree burns in seconds.

This June was the city’s hottest on record. In July, things got even worse: the city experienced a record seven days at 115F or higher and set a new all-time high of 120F.

The heat is just a signal of what’s to come. Temperatures in Las Vegas are rising faster than almost anywhere else in the US.

Meanwhile, Clark county, where Las Vegas is located, is bursting at the seams. The region is among the fastest-growing metro areas in the US. Roughly 2 million people have moved here over the last 50 years, with nearly a million more expected by 2060.

To accommodate them, the county has thrown its support behind a federal bill that would open up 25,000 acres of the surrounding desert for housing and commercial development. The county also has plans for a new airport, slated for completion in 2037, that would pave over thousands more acres of arid landscape near the California border.

New shopping centers and cul de sacs all mean more concrete – and more heat – in an area where the ability to afford or access air conditioning can already mean the difference between life and death.

Even after she spent most of the day inside, the heat still shocked Inata, a woman who traveled with her friends Chastity and Belinda from Massachusetts to vacation in the city last week. “It was horrendous,” she said. “In Massachusetts, if there was weather like this, there would be ambulances around.”

The three women said they struggled to cool down at the pool because the warm water offered little relief and the surrounding pavement burned their feet. “I don’t know how Las Vegas people do it but kudos to them,” she added. “I couldn’t do this every day.”

A daily battle for survival

The record heat is pushing residents to their limits – and has perhaps been most sinister for the more than 5,000 people in the county estimated to be experiencing homelessness.

Some have opted to seek refuge in underground tunnels during the summer, risking the waters that surge through them during summer monsoons over exposure to the brutal heat.

“We are trying to live – and it’s difficult,” said Tyson Williams, who has spent the last year living in his tent on the east side of town.

Williams paused to wipe the sweat rolling down his face as he filled a rolling cooler with water bottles provided to him by an outreach team, before downing an entire bottle in a single chug. A dilapidated umbrella he positioned over his tent did little to provide relief.

Born and raised in Las Vegas, he is a brick mason by trade, but now he panhandles for money to buy ice. He has just landed a job waving a sign outside a smoke shop, which will keep him outside and exposed to the elements. “We are all just one check away from being homeless,” he said.

Louis Lacey spends most of his summer days trying to save the lives of people like Williams, as the director of Help of Southern Nevada, a non-profit organization that hands out water, hygiene kits, and hope as part of a larger mission to get more people into permanent housing.

“I have been living here since 1972 and it would get hot – but not this kind of hot,” Lacey said last week as he drove through the city scanning sidewalks and drainages for anyone in need of aid.

As someone who has experienced homelessness himself, he said, the work is a calling. It’s also laced with heartbreak.

There was the woman whose leg was amputated after she got third-degree burns from passing out on the scalding hot sidewalk. She now uses a wheelchair. Just last week, he and other aid workers rushed to revive another woman, age 81, who passed out in an encampment. They found her surrounded by her pet dogs, who had all died in the heat. He was relieved they were able to save her. That’s not always how the story ends.

July is typically when local health officials report the highest number of heat-related deaths. Between 2022 and 2023 there was an 80% increase in fatalities, with the official number around 300, nearly double those counted in 2020.

The actual toll is believed to be far higher. Dozens of unhoused people died in the heat last year, and many of them, Lacey said, weren’t included in official fatality counts. He knows of at least 62 people and that doesn’t include others who got swept away by water in the tunnels.

This year the heat was worse – and while the numbers haven’t been released yet, many fear this July, too, will be brutal.

Emergencies on the rise as development rolls ahead

With impacts only expected to intensify in the coming years, the city and county are working to implement strategies to keep people safe.

There are 39 cooling stations across Clark county, but almost all are operated by unpaid volunteering organizations and typically close in the late afternoons. Only one city-run shelter is open during nights, weekends, and holidays.

Jace Radke, a spokesperson for the city of Las Vegas, acknowledged by email that there are challenges with heat safety but cited wide-scale reliance on air conditioning as a protective measure.

He also said the city planned to plant 60,000 trees by 2050, part of a program that has already planted 3,000 since 2020. The county has also laid out ambitious sustainability plans focused on expanding affordable housing, reducing emissions, and addressing the worsening effects of the climate crisis such as drought, heat and water shortages.

But there’s still a long way to go and lawmakers have lagged on implementing important mitigations, including heat protections for workers. Emergencies, meanwhile, have continued to surge in frequency.

Jordan Moore, a spokesperson for Las Vegas Fire & Rescue, said there has been a “significant increase in heat-related emergencies” in the past month. Meanwhile in Henderson, a Clark county city south-east of Las Vegas, heat-related emergencies are up 53%, according to the deputy fire chief Scott Vivier.

Populations including elderly people, unhoused people, those with underlying health conditions, and children are among the most at-risk. But this year the department is also getting numerous calls from people on the job.

“Delivery drivers, warehouse operators, our construction trades – basically anyone who has to work outside – we have seen emergencies from them and people with regular medical emergencies and during a normal day the heat causes them to succumb,” Vivier said. Heat-related complaints filed with the Nevada occupational safety and health administration (Osha) jumped 172% last July compared with a year earlier.

Vivier’s department is among the first in the region to use a new tool called the polar pod, which enables emergency responders to pack someone in ice and water while they transport them to the hospital. They’ve even trained to use the pods to revive overheated pets, Vivier added.

But Vivier is still worried about what the future will bring. “Heat is the No 1 weather-related cause of death for people around the world,” he said. “It’s a major, major issue we should all be concerned about.”

Even with the rising toll, the county’s hopes to grow deeper into the desert haven’t slowed.

Far from the din of the city and the suburbs, the hum of churning traffic fades into the background, replaced by soft breeze and silence. If the plan is enacted, these desert hillsides dotted in yucca trees and creosote could soon be covered in homes and strip malls.

Questions remain about whether building out the desert floor, proposed as a fix for the housing crisis in Clark county, will only perpetuate the dangers already alive in the city and suburbs.

“The desert is not a place for people who are living on the margins to begin with,” said Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the Great Basin Water Nework, an environmental advocacy organization. Roerink and others are also concerned about Joshua trees and wild desert tortoises, along with a host of other plants and animals, who would be sacrificed to satisfy continued sprawl.

“We are raised to believe that what is behind us right now is just normal and is doable, and fine, and that everything will be OK,” he said, waving toward the scorching cityscape where the history of rapid expansion in Las Vegas is already on full display. When many of those homes were built, water was much more freely available and the summers were far less lethal. “But these are radically transformed landscapes – and that comes with consequences.”

Back in east Las Vegas, Louis Lacey is wrapping up an afternoon of administering aid. The housing crisis and those impacted by it are all that is keeping him here. He dreams of the small town he will move to when he is finally ready to hang up his hat.

“I have been living in this hell for so long and I feel like this is my mission … But when I am done I want to move to a town where it rains and has four seasons. I don’t want to be in this,” he said, gesturing to the gridlocked traffic.

That doesn’t mean he’ll stop worrying about the city’s future and where the 800 people his organization helped get shelter will wind up. “When I moved here, there were 200,000 people – now there are almost 3 million,” he said.

“The only question I have is: is the growth sustainable?” Lacey sighed deeply, his expression pained. “We have the land,” he said, “but do we have the resources?”