New Orleans may not have seen a hurricane over the last year, but extreme weather came in plenty of other forms.

This time last year, a tornado struck New Orleans on the heels of a winter storm. Then summer arrived, with scorching temperatures that drove residents indoors and caused the state’s first extreme heat emergency declaration. As temperatures climbed above 100 degrees, a persistent drought caused Mississippi River levels to drop, driving salty sea water upstream and threatening south Louisiana’s drinking water supply. 

And as Louisiana dealt with an unprecedented wildfire season spurred by heat and drought, smoke combined with the state’s moist conditions to create “super fogs,” leading to the death of eight people in two separate highway pileups, in one of the most unexpected climate consequences of the year. 

While New Orleans made it through hurricane season without a major storm, the Gulf saw record-high sea temperatures this year, a trend that’s likely to continue, which experts say will pose a major risk for the future. 

This year’s climate events presented new challenges to the city’s emergency management teams, exposing vulnerabilities and infrastructure issues. The drought, and its unanticipated consequences, was undoubtedly the climate event of the year, said Louisiana State Climatologist Barry D. Keim. 

This year in review: ‘We just baked and baked and baked’

A volunteer for St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church delivers water to Grand Bayou Indian Village on October 13, 2023. Credit: Lue Palmer / Verite News

“You hit 2023 and we’ve had 17 days where we cracked 100 degrees,” Keim said, noting a sudden jump from previous years’ temperatures. “That’s just one metric to show you how freaky this year was.” 

As of this month, Louisiana is still the epicenter of drought in the country, even with recent rain, according to the US Drought Monitor. The extreme heat caused 22 deaths in Orleans Parish between June and September alone, according to the most recent data from the Orleans Parish Coroner’s Office. 

The city’s emergency managers first became concerned with the heat around the weekend of the Juneteenth holiday, said Anna Nguyen, public engagement director at NOLA Ready. As “feels like” temperatures reached as high as 115 degrees, the city opened overnight cooling centers in an effort to protect those most vulnerable from heat exposure

A combination of factors led to this year’s extreme spike in temperature, Keim said, including the season’s El Niño and a dome of high pressure that “parked” over Louisiana all summer, trapping warm air and preventing rain clouds from forming. 

Climate change may also have escalated the temperatures, Keim added, pointing to the effects of burning fossil fuels, considered the largest contributor to climate change across the globe. 

While the heat dome effect is not unusual, such domes usually move on after several days, relieving an area from high temperatures. Keim said he still doesn’t know why this year’s heat dome hung around for so long. 

“I scratched my head,” Keim said. “I don’t know. It just created this very unusual scenario where it just didn’t rain, and it just baked us. We just baked and baked and baked.”

As emergency managers discussed plans for protecting the city from extreme heat in mid-June, residents in lower Plaquemines Parish were already battling the effects of the drought on the Mississippi River, in what would develop into a months-long drinking water crisis

Saltwater intrusion events are becoming more frequent, in part due to sea level rise and industry dredging of the Mississippi River. But this year marked the first state and federal declaration of a drinking water crisis caused by saltwater intrusion in New Orleans, as the Army Corps of Engineers forecasted that a “saltwater wedge” would continue up the river. 

While forecasts estimated the saltwater wedge would reach Orleans Parish in late October, the city explored multi-year solutions, including plans for an expensive pipeline to draw water near Kenner to the city’s Carrollton treatment facility. Concerns also arose over the potential effect of excess salt water on New Orleans’ outdated water infrastructure, and the risk of lead leaching. 

Although Mississippi River levels were at an extreme low, dry conditions in the marshes of New Orleans East caused fires that continued to burn underground well into the fall. Emergency teams had to transport their equipment into the brackish waters of the region’s bayous. As the city sought support from out-of-state firefighters, the conditions of this unprecedented season exposed gaps in training for fighting wildfires.

Louisiana’s extraordinary fire season also introduced one of the most unexpected consequences of this year’s drought event — fatal car crashes on I-55 and I-10, and the super fog that caused them

Fog is normal in the fall in New Orleans, said Lauren Nash, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Weather Service, as she reflected on the tragedies from earlier this year. However, when smoke combines with moist air to create an extra dense fog, drivers can be engulfed within seconds. Predicting where super fog events will hit, Nash said, is next to impossible, and a question of which way the wind blows. 

How the heat dome may have spared us from hurricane season 

Signs direct people to a NOLA Ready cooling tent serving the houseless encampment community under the Pontchartrain Expressway on Tchoupitoulas Street during the summer’s extreme heat wave on Sept. 11, 2023. Credit: Lue Palmer / Verite News

The quiet hurricane season this year in New Orleans may be related to the pressure dome that contributed to this summer’s extreme heat, Keim said. 

This year saw record-breaking temperatures in the Gulf Coast, which meteorologists warned could be a hurricane breeding ground. And, Keim said, this largely held true

“Believe it or not, we had a very busy hurricane season. Just none of them came in our general direction,” Keim said, noting that the dome of high pressure clamped over the region may have helped steer hurricanes away from New Orleans. 

Meteorologists hoped that this year’s El Niño, which is often a signpost for a slow hurricane season, would cancel out the temperatures in the Gulf. However, with off-the-charts heat, the combination of conditions became very difficult to predict. 

“The problem is, we’ve never had sea surface temperatures this warm before,” Keim said, noting that despite the El Niño, there were still 20 named storms in the region this season. “But we were lucky here in the north-central Gulf Coast.” 

While summer temperatures in the Gulf Coast are not expected to drop anytime soon, the question of whether next year will deliver a hurricane or a heat dome remains to be answered. 

Keim said he doesn’t expect extreme heat events to occur yearly, but people may experience them more often over a lifetime as climate change escalates: “I would be shocked if we had another [heat dome next year]. But I mean, it can happen,” he said. “I don’t want to sugarcoat that.” 

Preparing for new emergencies: ‘Know what you can handle’

Volunteers with the health outreach group Freestanding Communities perform a wellness check at one of the city’s cooling tents on September 8. Credit: Courtesy NOLA Ready

Hurricanes strengthened by extremely warm sea temperatures are something we are very likely to see in the future, Nash said. And rapid intensification of storms, caused in part by warmer temperatures, is changing the way that we prepare for emergencies. 

Rapid intensification happens when tropical cyclone winds increase by 35 miles an hour in a 24-hour period, shortening the time residents have to evacuate or prepare other safety measures. 

“We just don’t want people to think they’re gonna get a seven-day notice that a Cat 5 is coming in the climate that we live in today. You know, you may get 24 or 36 hours,” Nash said, noting that rapid intensification makes preparing ahead of time and frequently checking reliable sources for storm updates even more important. 

Personal hurricane kits and budgeting for high utility bills in warm weather should all be part of personal preparedness, Nash said: “Know what you can handle and what your risk level is.”

With so many different kinds of emergencies, the city’s approach is to prepare for multiple disasters at once. 

Nguyen, with NOLA Ready, said that part of the challenge of this year was the very different nature of the back-to-back emergencies. 

In a hurricane, schools, businesses and non-essential government functions shut down. But in this summer’s heat emergency, regular city operations had to continue. This meant emergency managers couldn’t readily pull workers from other departments to staff cooling centers, the city’s first defense against extreme heat. This summer, NOLA Ready operated cooling sites across the city in community centers and churches, providing air conditioning, bottled water and health screenings to vulnerable residents. 

The emergency resource center model — designated places that provide air conditioning during a heat event or shelter during a hurricane — is a multi-disaster approach that is being developed across the city with a network of organizations

NOLA Ready is working to make these emergency centers more accessible, putting up the first mobile resource tent next to the former Tchoupitoulas homeless encampment this summer, Nguyen said. The city is exploring similar solutions for next year to deliver services to the city’s most vulnerable residents. 

The summer’s events also opened up new lines of communication, as emergency managers in Orleans, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes worked together to develop a strategy for saltwater intrusion. 

While community managers develop new plans for next year’s unprecedented challenges, climate-focused community organizations say they’re still doing their own preparation work. 

Shamyra Lavigne is an environmental organizer in St. James Parish, where residents have been fighting air pollution from petrochemical plants. Reflecting on an unsettling season, Lavigne — who is also the daughter of RISE St. James founder Sharon Lavigne — said this year’s weather and the fight against emissions in Cancer Alley cannot be disconnected.

“It gives more legitimacy to our fight where you’re seeing these record-breaking temperatures and the erosion of the wetlands. It’s all connected,” Lavigne said. “The wind does not discriminate, it blows everywhere. And this fog doesn’t discriminate. It all lands on everybody’s house. And this heat is hot for all of us. There’s no escaping this.” 

Arthur Johnson, CEO of the Lower 9th Ward Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development (CSED), said a lack of trust in public officials and community anxiety are two of the reasons why his organization focuses on long-term strategies to protect against climate disasters. 

After this year’s bizarre events, “there’s a feeling of mistrust, or no trust in relation to the information that’s out there,” Johnson said. CSED, located at the corner of Chartres and Egania streets, currently runs research internships for high school students to study the health effects of extreme heat, air pollution and soil contamination on their community. 

CSED is also part of an initiative to restore the region’s coastal hurricane buffer, planting thousands of cypress trees over the next three years and using recycled materials to rebuild the area’s eroding land. 

“We have to take the reins ourselves, and we have to make things happen,” Johnson said. “We can’t just wait.”

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