Record-breaking heat this week claimed the life of one person, a 46-year -old woman who died from heat stroke just North of downtown Thursday.

Researchers with UTSA say this area is one of the hottest in the city.

Through years of research UTSA professors Esteban Lopez Ochoa and Kristen Brown are evaluating the environments people live in in San Antonio. They know infrastructure needs to change otherwise certain pockets of the city will just get hotter and hotter.

“In paved areas there’s much higher temps…San Antonio has a lot of highways…those temperatures are often a lot higher near those highways," Brown said.

Ochoa and Brown have found downtown, East, West and Southside neighborhoods experience higher temperatures than most.

San Antonio officials worked closely with UTSA to identify the areas where the pavement was installed based on temperature readings and census data on neighborhood race, ethnicity and household income. “We looked not just where the heat hits harder but where people are more vulnerable to the heat and its effects,” said Kristen Brown, assistant professor of environmental engineering at UTSA. Energy burden, or how much of a household’s income is spent on utility bills, was one of the factors that helped identify areas where residents were more vulnerable and could benefit from the project, Brown said.

“Working across departments and with UTSA, we’re trying to figure out how do we leverage the existing resources that we have within the organization … to come up with a multiyear mitigation strategy?” Melnick told council members. “We’ve started community engagement in these neighborhoods. We want to understand how do they experience heat.”

The City of San Antonio partnered with the University of Texas at San Antonio's (UTSA) Sustainable Pervasive Urban Resilience (SPUR) Center to measure heat vulnerability in San Antonio and help direct resources toward the areas most impacted by extreme heat.

As commissioned by the Office of Sustainability of the City of San Antonio (CoSA), this report presents the results from the applied research conducted by UTSA faculty within the Sustainable, Pervasive Urban Resilience (SPUR) Center to help answer the question “How Can We Direct City Resources Toward the Areas Most Impacted by Extreme Heat?” It is not a secret that the City of San Antonio experiences extreme heat. Beyond causing discomfort, every year, residents visit the hospital as a result of exposure to this hazard. Heat vulnerability is not uniform across San Antonio due to the built-environment and socioeconomic conditions, impacting some areas more than others. Therefore, it is important that heat reduction actions are conducted prioritizing areas that are most vulnerable to heat and its impacts. To help ensure the City’s efforts are most effectively targeted, this analysis applies analytical techniques to quantify vulnerability to heat.

Click on a state on the graph to generate the results in the graph to the right