Economic Status Was A Factor In [1995 Chicago] Heat Wave Deaths

When it's hot, Chicagoans naturally compare the degree of heat to that historic summer of 1995 when a killer heat wave devastated the city. It turns out that heat kills more Americans than all other natural disasters combined.

A typical hot spell during a Chicago summer lasts a few days and then rain cools off the city, but July ‘95 was not typical. The temperature hit 106 degrees at Midway on July 13th and the oppressive humidity made it feel like 127.

The day before, the Sun-Times suggested "Heat Wave Can Be A Killer." How right that was. By the 15th, the death toll was 209.

So many bodies started showing up at the morgue that refrigerated trucks were brought in to handle the overflow. Still, the death toll kept climbing.

One morgue worker said, “This is the worst -- even plane crashes, train crashes, everything -- this is the worst."

Streets and Sanitation workers closed hundreds of hydrants only to see them flowing again minutes later. Water pressure dropped. Apartments went dry.

Missy Spiller of Englewood said, “No water and I have babies that need water.”

Power failed, food spoiled, and cooling centers closed because they could no longer cool.

Eric Klinenberg, author of “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy Of Disaster In Chicago” said, “The mayor, rather than claiming it an official disaster and trying to bring in more programs, actively denied and expressed skepticism that the deaths were happening.”

Sociologist and author Eric Kleinenberg says initially City Hall was not prepared and too slow to respond to the crisis. The former public health commissioner says that is not true.

John Willhelm, the 1995 Chicago Public Health commissioner, said, “As soon as we were made aware that these were heat-related deaths, the mayor convened the department heads at his office and the City began to coordinate its response.”

Critics argue the City should have been aware and should have responded a lot sooner to save society's most vulnerable: the poor, isolated, elderly. Many of them lived in fear of crime in apartments with the windows locked shut and no air conditioning.

“It was kind of evenly divided between African-American and white and almost no Hispanic and almost no Asian,” Willhelm said.

A study found that communities where the elderly live alone like Hispanic Little Village had far fewer fatalities than other communities like North Lawndale which is predominately African-American and only a few blocks away. One reason: Little Village is booming; North Lawndale is blighted.

Klinenberg said, “It's not just about race and it's not just about what individuals do. Place and neighborhood actually matters a lot for our everyday health and for our ability to survive a crisis.”

By the time another heat wave hit in 1999, a new emergency management control center was up on West Madison with a Well-Being Task Force comprised of City workers trained by nurses. They answer phones and knock on doors.

“Every day of the week we're out there, not just in extreme weather,” Chicago Department On Aging Commissioner Joyce Gallagher said. “Call 311, give us an address and we'll go out and check on the individual…if we don't know where the individuals are, then we can't bring help to them."

In Homewood Cemetery, some of the 739 heat wave victims who died alone were buried together in the Cook County pauper's grave.

Klinenberg said, “It's an open secret in Chicago that our cityworks also has these undersides -- everyday crises that we need to address. The challenge is: can we do that when there's not a disaster so we can prevent a real disaster from taking place?”

http://thomasgalvin.blogspot.com/2005/09/forgotten-national-tragedy-bill.html

FORGOTTEN NATIONAL TRAGEDY: BILL CLINTON AND 1,000 DEATHS IN THE "CHICAGO HEAT WAVE" OF 1995

Hillary Clinton has called for a "Katrina Commission." How come she never called for a commission to investigate why at least 1,000 Americans died in a 1995 heat wave when her husband was president?

The "Chicago heat wave" killed more people than Hurricane Andrew, TWA Flight 800, the Oklahoma City bombing and the Northridge, CA earthquake, combined.

Victims of the Chicago Heave Wave were buried in mass graves. (picture, Slate)

Hillary Clinton made sure she did the rounds of the morning network chat shows on Wednesday. She told ABC, CBS and NBC that "FEMA worked very well during the Clinton administration." And, criticizing FEMA director Michael Brown she said, "I would never have appointed such a person", a statement that sounds to me like it was the first salvo in the 2008 presidential election.

Curiously, Hillary Clinton did not point out what her husband and administration did to prevent widespread suffering as a result of the massive heat wave that struck the Midwest in 1995 and was particularly devastating to the city of Chicago.

For one terrible week in July 1995, daytime temperatures in Chicago soared above 100 degrees; even at night the mercury barely dipped below that. Public-health officials knew the prolonged heat would be deadly, especially for frail seniors, but they were stunned by the final death toll. Altogether, the heat wave killed more than 700 Chicagoans, more than double the number who died in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. As New York University sociologist Eric Klinenberg writes in Heat Wave, his remarkable book about the tragedy, "The proportional death toll ... in Chicago has no equal in the record of U.S. heat disasters."
-The American Prospect Online

Maybe Hillary feels that her husband is above blame because local and state officials are responsible for taking care of people during a widespread natural disaster.

During July 12-16, 1995, Chicago experienced unusually high maximum daily temperatures, ranging from 93 F to 104 F (33.9C to 40.0C). On July 13, the heat index* peaked at 119 F (48.3C) -- a record high for the city.
-CDC Report

However, a five day period of an unfolding natural disaster was not enough to merit any federal attention or direct help from President Clinton. Perhaps it is necessary for the federal government to step in the aftermath of a hurricane but not a widespread heat wave?

The [NOAA] report also recommends that emergency response organizations at the federal, state and local levels recognize severe heat waves as potential natural disasters, and that areas at risk should be prompted to develop emergency response plans for severe heat waves.
- NOAA press release

Okay, so there was a call for better federal help in the future when it comes to helping local authorities deal with heat waves. After all, it should very easy for the federal government, "the cavalry", to come in because there are no physical limitations in entering a stricken city. The city of Chicago was not flooded, buildings were not destroyed, bridges were not taken out, and trees were not blocking roads. How hard was it for Bill Clinton to make sure that FEMA was rushed to Chicago to prevent thousands of poor and urban residents from dying of heat stroke? That's a question that could have been answered by a "Heat Wave Commission."

It was no secret that Chicago was suffering. Eric Klinenberg wrote the definitive book on the disaster, "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago." This is what he had to say in an interview with the University of Chicago Press:

On the first day of the heat wave, Thursday, July 13, the temperature hit 106 degrees, and the heat index - a combination of heat and humidity that measures the temperature a typical person would feel - rose above 120. For a week, the heat persisted, running between the 90s and low 100s...
[...]
The heat made the city's roads buckle. Train rails warped, causing long commuter and freight delays. City workers watered bridges to prevent them from locking when the plates expanded. Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department. Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses. But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.

Where was the federal government, Hillary?

After about forty-eight hours of continuous exposure to heat, the body's defenses begin to fail. So by Friday, July 14, thousands of Chicagoans had developed severe heat-related illnesses. Paramedics couldn't keep up with emergency calls, and city hospitals were overwhelmed. Twenty-three hospitals - most on the South and Southwest Sides - went on bypass status, closing the doors of their emergency rooms to new patients. Some ambulance crews drove around the city for miles looking for an open bed.

Forty-eight hours?! Where was your husband, Hillary?

Hundreds of victims never made it to a hospital. The most overcrowded place in the city was the Cook County Medical Examiners Office, where police transported hundreds of bodies for autopsies. The morgue typically receives about 17 bodies a day and has a total of 222 bays. By Saturday - just three days into the heat wave - its capacity was exceeded by hundreds, and the county had to bring in a fleet of refrigerated trucks to store the bodies. Police officers had to wait as long as three hours for a worker to receive the body. It was gruesome and incredible for this to be happening in the middle of a modern American city.

In reaction to Katrina, the media asked, "how could this happen in an American city?" Curiously, none of them were so angered and full of shock and awe in 1995. By the way, Hillary, where was the cavalry?

The media was notified but the heat wave warning was met with a yawn:

Macko said that he was surprised that the ERRI warnings received very little attention from the national press, and that ERRI didn't receive any inquiries about the heat emergency, or the Institute's recommendations, until late Saturday. By then, he said that the heat emergency had turned into a "full blown disaster".
-Emergency.com

Klinenberg describes how the government of Chicago mayor Richard Daley was caught flat-footed by the growing crisis. Sound familiar?

Yet there is no question that the city government did not do everything it could to prevent the catastrophe. The city failed to implement its own heat emergency plan, waiting until Saturday, July 15, after hundreds of bodies had already been delivered to the county morgue, to declare an official emergency.
-University of Chicago Press

Curiously, the role of the federal government never came up in the University of Chicago Press's interview with Mr. Klinenberg. FEMA and Bill Clinton were never mentioned in the interview.

No one will every really know how many people died:

"Many of our patients died in the hospital several weeks later," said Dr. Jane Dematte of Michael Reese Hospital. "They would not have all been counted in the medical examiner's office......"

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