When Chicago Baked Unheeded Lessons From Another Great Urban Catastrophe.

Slate ^ | September 2, 2005 | Eric Klinenberg

[texianyankee]

Sept. 11 was an epochal event in American culture, so it's no surprise that it's everyone's favorite comparison to the destruction of New Orleans. But the more instructive analogy is another great urban catastrophe in recent American history: The 1995 Chicago heat wave, when a blend of extreme weather, political mismanagement, and abandonment of vulnerable city residents resulted in the loss of water, widespread power outages, thousands of hospitalizations, and 739 deaths in a devastating week.

---

Affluent and middle-class Chicagoans had little trouble getting out of harm's way. They either turned on their air conditioners or fled for cooler destinations. Thousands of poor, old, isolated, and sick people, especially those concentrated in the city's segregated African-American ghettos, on the other hand, were effectively trapped in lethal conditions. Neither federal nor local agencies did much to assist them. Instead, city patrols cracked down on young people who opened fire hydrants.

-------

Images of the "water war" between the teens and the city workers featured prominently in the local media, as did long sound bites from political officials who insisted that no one had foreseen the danger of heat waves and that they had done everything they could to respond. The commissioner of human services said that people died because they neglected to take care of themselves. The mayor blamed families for refusing to protect their kin. Outraged representatives of Chicago's African-American neighborhoods argued the obvious: Everyone knew which people and places were going to be most affected by the heat. The victims' vulnerability was predictable, and so was the city's neglect. Yet their complaints got little attention, and the story of what happened to their communities remains largely unknown.

---

[SevenDaysInMay]

I wonder if the majority of the Chicago dead and hospitalized were as grotesquely morbidly obese as many, many living we saw in N.O.?

It doesn't pay to have an extra 200+ 'food stamps' pounds in 90+F heat waves or floods, unless you plan on floating out before you're dead a while.

/cruel blubbery congestive heart failure insight off

[Redbob]

"Yeah, it generally sucks to be poor. That's why most of us work so hard not to be."

Same is true both in Chicago and New Orleans.

Also pays not to be stupid, but what can you do?

[satchmodog9]

It's OK. Bill felt their pain.