For people who live nearby, it’s no mystery why the equipment is in relatively pristine shape: Children don’t come here to play.

“Because kids are smart,” explained , an artist and urban designer who lives about a block away on Dumaine Street. “It’s the adults who aren’t. It’s the adults who built the playground under the interstate.”

Hunter’s Field is wedged directly beneath the elevated roadbeds of the Claiborne Expressway section of Interstate 10 in the city’s 7th Ward.

There are no sounds of laughter or children playing. The constant cuh-clunk, cuh-clunk of the traffic passing overhead makes it difficult to hold a conversation with someone standing next to you. An average of 115,000 vehicles a day use the overpass, according to .

“I have never seen a child play here,” Stelly said.

Stelly keeps a sharp eye on this area as part of her advocacy work with the , a group of residents and business owners dedicated to revitalizing the predominantly African American community on either side of the looming expressway.

For as long as she can remember, Stelly has been fighting to dismantle that section of the highway. She’s lived in the neighborhood her entire life and said the noise is oftentimes unbearable. “You can sustain hearing damage,” she said. Now, she’s helping collect new noise and air pollution data to show it needs to be taken down.

The was built in the 1960s, when the construction of interstates and highways was a symbol of progress and economic development in the U.S.

But that supposed progress often came at a great cost for marginalized communities — especially predominantly Black neighborhoods.

When it was built, the “Claiborne Corridor,” as it’s still sometimes known, tore through the , one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods.

For more than a century before the construction of the expressway, bustling Claiborne Avenue constituted the backbone of economic and cultural life for Black New Orleans. Back then, the oak-lined avenue was home to more than 120 businesses. Today, only a few dozen remain.

What happened to Claiborne Avenue isn’t unique. directly through low-income minority neighborhoods, dividing communities and polluting the air.

In Montgomery, Alabama, I-85 the city’s only middle-class Black neighborhood and was “designed to displace and punish the organizers of the civil rights movement,” according to , a community planning professor at Auburn University. In Nashville, planners intentionally looped I-40 around a white community, and sent it a prominent Black neighborhood, knocking down hundreds of homes and businesses. Examples like this exist in .

The federal government has started working on ways to confront the damage highway construction continues to do to low-income and minority communities. An initiative established in the called the seeks to do just that: reconnect neighborhoods and communities that were divided by infrastructure.

But there’s wide disagreement on the best way to do that, and some strategies are likely to do little to limit the health effects of living near these highways. What’s unfolding in New Orleans shows how challenging it is to pick and fund projects that will help.

Competing Visions for the Claiborne Expressway

Stelly’s group, the Claiborne Avenue Alliance, submitted for Reconnecting Communities Pilot money. It wanted $1.6 million in federal funds primarily for public engagement, data collection, and feasibility planning to work to assess whether it would be possible to remove the expressway altogether, with a plan to raise $400,000 more to cover costs.

And it seemed possible its grant proposal would succeed, since even the as a textbook example of the biased planning history in a published statement about the Reconnecting Communities Pilot. Ultimately, though, the federal Department of Transportation, the agency charged with allocating the program’s money, denied the Claiborne Avenue Alliance’s grant request.

Instead, the Department of Transportation offered requested in a competing made by the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. That plan called for a $47 million grant from Reconnecting Communities to do overpass improvements, remove some on- and off-ramps, and, most significantly, create the “Claiborne Innovation District” to promote public life and cultural activities under the highway. DOT granted just $500,000 for the project.

Stelly said she likes a few aspects of the city-state proposal, notably the plan to remove on- and off-ramps to improve pedestrian safety beneath the expressway and other public safety projects, like better lighting and dedicated pedestrian and bicycle lanes.

But, notably, Stelly called the idea of creating an entertainment space and market beneath the highway misguided and ridiculous. Would it be a waste of scarce government funds?

“It’s a foolish idea because you’re going to be exposed to the same thing” as the neglected playground, Stelly said. “You’re going to be exposed to the same levels of noise. It’s not a wise decision to build anything under here.”

Using Science to Inform Policy

Since her group’s proposal was denied, Stelly and her organization are turning to a new strategy: helping with funded by the Environmental Protection Agency on the expressway’s health impacts. They hope the data will support them in their efforts to remove the highway from their neighborhood.

In addition to noise impacts, the EPA-funded study is looking at the health impacts of pollution under the Claiborne Expressway — especially harmful pollutants like particulate matter 2.5, or PM 2.5.

These microscopic particles, measuring 2.5 microns or less in diameter, are released from the tailpipes of passing vehicles, said Adrienne Katner, an associate professor at the Louisiana State University School of Public Health, who is the principal investigator on the EPA study. They’re so small that, when inhaled, they lodge deep in the lungs. From there, they can migrate to the circulatory system, and then spread and potentially affect every system in the body.

“So the heart, the brain,” said Katner. “If a woman is pregnant, it can cross the placental barrier. So it has a lot of impacts.”

Katner and her team of researchers are beginning the study by taking preliminary readings with monitors at different points along the expressway. Completing the research and publishing the data will likely take two to three years.

One of Katner’s monitoring sites is Hunter’s Field Playground. Graduate researcher Jacquelynn Mornay said the noise levels registered there could cause permanent hearing damage after an hour or so of exposure. The pollution levels recorded hover around 18 micrograms per cubic meter.

“It should be at most — at most — 12,” said Beatrice Duah, another graduate student researcher. “So it is way over the limits.”

Residents and workers occupying the homes and businesses lining the area under the expressway are exposed daily to these levels of noise and pollution. When complete, this EPA study will join a decades-long body of research about how traffic pollution affects the human body.

“We’re not inventing the science here,” Katner said. “All I’m doing is showing them what we already know and then documenting it, giving them the data to then inform and influence policy. That’s all I can do.”

‘Removal Is the Only Cure’

Eventually, the study’s findings could help other communities divided by infrastructure across the country, Katner said.

“A lot of cities are going through this right now and they’re looking back at their highway systems,” she said. “They’re looking back at the impacts that it’s had on a community and they’re trying to figure out what to do next. I’m hoping that this project will inform them.”

Amy Stelly said she’s always known the air she and her neighbors breathe isn’t safe, but she’s hopeful that having concrete data to support her efforts will do more to persuade policymakers to address the problem. That could mean taking down the dangerous on- and off-ramps — or scrapping what she considers to be the wasteful plan of putting a market and event space under the highway overpass.

Stelly sees only one true solution to the problems posed by the Claiborne Expressway, only one way to really right the wrongs done to her community.

“Removal is the only cure,” Stelly said. “I’m insisting on it because I’m a resident of the neighborhood and I live with this every day.” And, she said, “the science tells us there’s no other way.”

This article is from a partnership that includes , , and ËØÈËÉ«ÇéƬHealth News.

ËØÈËÉ«ÇéƬHealth News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

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New Orleans Emergency Medical Services has been busy this summer, responding to heat-related emergency calls and transporting patients to nearby hospitals.

At the city’s main ambulance depot, the concrete parking lot seemed to magnify the sweltering heat, circulating the air like a convection oven. Capt. Janick Lewis and Lt. Titus Carriere demonstrated there how they can load a stretcher into an ambulance using an automated loading system. Lewis wiped sweat from his brow as the loading arm whirred and hummed, raising the stretcher into the ambulance — “unit,” in official terminology.

But mechanical assistance isn’t the best thing about the upgraded vehicles. “The nicest thing about being assigned a brand-new unit is it has a brand-new air conditioning system,” Lewis said.

The new AC is much more than a luxury for the hard-working crews. They need the extra cooling power to help save lives.

“The No. 1 thing you do take care of somebody is get them out of the heat, get them somewhere cool,” Lewis said. “So the No. 1 thing we spend our time worrying about in the summertime is keeping the truck cool.”

Like much of the country, New Orleans has been embroiled in a heat wave for weeks. As a result, New Orleans EMS is responding to more calls for heat-related conditions than ever before, Lewis said. During the third week of July, the city’s public EMS crews responded to 29 heat-related calls — more than triple what they handled during the same period last year.

Scientists say dangerous heat levels — and the stress they put on human bodies and medical systems — will likely keep increasing. Health systems nationwide face serious funding and staffing challenges that could make it harder to keep up.

New Orleans EMS is no exception. In April, it reported operating with only . The city’s chief of EMS has called for increased funding for higher wages to attract more workers. Local private ambulance services like Acadian Ambulance Services pay staffers between $50 and $70 per hour. The city’s EMS department can’t compete.

Lewis said they’re making do with the resources they have and prioritizing one-time expenses like new ambulances to help them meet the challenges they’re facing.

“We’re going to provide the care everybody needs, regardless of how hot it gets,” Lewis said. “We’d love to have all the help in the world, but we’re getting the job done with what we have right now.”

When a human being is exposed to high levels of heat for too long, their core body temperature rises. Once core body temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit, . If not quickly addressed, that can prompt an escalating cascade of health problems.

The first stage is heat exhaustion, Carriere explained: “That means you’re hot, you may have an elevated temp, but you also have what’s called diaphoresis, which means your body is sweating, is still trying to compensate and cool yourself off.” You’ll also likely have other symptoms like weakness, dizziness, or a headache.

Carriere said that if a person can quickly get out of the heat and into an air-conditioned place, generally they’ll recover from heat exhaustion on their own. Otherwise, their core temperature will continue to rise.

As internal body temperature approaches 104 degrees, people start to suffer from heatstroke.

“Once you move to heatstroke, your body stops compensating,” Carriere said. “You stop sweating. You’re hot. You’re dry. And your organs are basically frying themselves from the inside out.”

When a person stops sweating, it becomes even harder for the body to cool itself down. During heatstroke, people may experience other severe symptoms like an altered state of mind, confusion, and a rapid, erratic pulse. They may even lose consciousness.

Without medical intervention, heatstroke can be deadly. EMS responders start treatment immediately after they arrive on the scene. “We’ll get them on a gurney, get them into the unit, start removing their clothing, and put ice packs wherever applicable to try to cool them down,” said Carriere.

Once a heatstroke patient is loaded into the ambulance, the crew races them to a nearby hospital, Carriere said. At University Medical Center, New Orleans’ largest hospital, doctors and nurses will continue efforts to quickly lower the person’s body temperature and replace fluids by IV, if necessary.

“When the patient ends up at the hospital, we’re going to continue that cooling process,” said Jeffrey Elder, medical director for emergency management at UMC. “We’re going to put them in an ice water bath,” and, he added, “we may use some misting fans and some cold fluids to get their body temperature down to a reasonable temperature while we’re supporting all the other bodily functions.”

Getting a patient’s core temperature down as quickly as possible is what will ultimately save their life. One way doctors can speed that along is by burying a patient in ice. In some parts of the country, doctors have placed patients inside body bags prepacked with pounds of ice. Body bags are especially useful in these cases because they are waterproof and designed to closely fit the human form.

UMC’s emergency room doesn’t use body bags, but during the summer staffers keep bags of ice ready at all times.

“On the stretcher, we’ll use some of the sheets as kind of a barrier,” Elder said. “And while they’re on the stretcher, we’ll just put the ice on them right then and there.” Hospital staffers will continue to work to cool a patient down until their temperature gets below 100.

Elder said that while it always gets hot in New Orleans during the summer, his emergency room has been treating more heat-related illnesses in 2023 than ever before. A few patients have died from the heat. UMC has been struggling with staffing challenges since the beginning of the pandemic, just like many other hospital systems elsewhere. But to prepare for an influx of patients with heat-related illnesses, UMC has prioritized staffing of the emergency department, Elder said.

Across the country, meteorological events like heat waves and heat domes will become more frequent and intense in the future, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Extreme summer heat is increasing in the United States,” said , a health scientist with the CDC’s . “And climate projections are indicating that extreme heat events will be more frequent and intense in the coming decades.”

Health infrastructure will be challenged to keep up to treat patients suffering from extreme heat exposure. In New Orleans, both first responders and doctors say they expect to see more patients with heat-related illnesses.

“We haven’t even gotten to the hottest part yet, which is typically August to September,” said Carriere. “So I’m expecting it to get pretty bad.”

This article is from a partnership that includes , , and ËØÈËÉ«ÇéƬHealth News.

ËØÈËÉ«ÇéƬHealth News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about .

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).