The Heat Advisory Commission
Our flagship policy objective: a state institution for the heat we already live with.
Texas and heat are synonymous — and the heat is getting worse. In March 2025 the National Weather Service renamed its “Excessive Heat Warning” to “Extreme Heat Warning,” because the old language no longer described Texas summers.
Yet Texas has no institution responsible for understanding who the heat kills, where, and doing what work. Heat deaths are routinely coded as cardiac arrest or “natural causes.” Occupation and jobsite information, when recorded at all, is buried in investigative narratives nobody aggregates. An independent archive tracking Texas occupational heat deaths currently stands at 47 cases — every one of them found the hard way, through OSHA records and news reports, because no state system counts them.
The proposal
A standing Texas Heat Advisory Commission, charged with one umbrella mission: “institutionalize the visibility” of heat as a killer in Texas. Everything else follows from that.
Seven organizing principles carry out the mission:
Count every heat casualty
Standardize heat-death reporting across all 254 counties — medical examiner offices and Justice of the Peace inquests alike. A death with heat as a contributing factor must be recorded as such, not laundered into “cardiac arrest.” What gets counted gets addressed; what doesn’t, doesn’t.
Put the jobsite on the record
Death reports must carry occupation, employer, and worksite information as structured data — not as an afterthought in a narrative. A roofer who dies at 108° and an office worker who dies at 108° are different policy problems. The form should know the difference.
Publish it
A public, regularly updated dashboard of heat casualties — deaths and hospitalizations — by county, occupation, and circumstance. Sunlight is the mechanism: employers, insurers, and the public should all see the same numbers.
Require employer reporting
Employers must report heat-related illness and hospitalization among workers, the way they report other workplace injuries. Voluntary data collection has produced a decade of undercounting.
Give workers a direct way to report
The people closest to the danger see it first. A worker who suffers heat illness — or watches a coworker collapse — needs a direct, retaliation-free channel to the commission: a hotline and an online report form, in English and Spanish, with real whistleblower protection behind it.
Advise on standards
The commission should issue evidence-based guidance on water, shade, and rest requirements; acclimatization protocols for new and returning workers; and high-heat-day work rules — grounded in Texas data, not borrowed from milder states.
Define a Texas heat-danger standard
Texas currently outsources its definition of a dangerous heat day to a dozen-plus National Weather Service offices, each setting its own warning thresholds — thresholds a CDC official has acknowledged “are often not informed by when you’ll start seeing health effects.” The result: Lubbock County triggered 2 extreme-heat warnings in ten years while regularly hitting 106°F. The commission should establish uniform, Texas-calibrated heat triggers for worker protection — grounded in temperature and occupational exposure, not inconsistent federal alert criteria.
The ask
A legislative mandate creating the commission, with dedicated staff, records access to ME/JP offices, and a statutory requirement that its casualty data be public. Start with visibility. The standards will follow the numbers.
Drafted September 2026; updated October 2026. Data: independent Texas occupational heat-death archive (47 cases); NWS warning archive 2016–2026 (8,592 county warning-days).
Future policy objectives
The commission is where it starts. Further policy objectives will be published here as they’re developed.
— HEAThens Against HEAT