A heat wave killed hundreds in Chicago nearly 30 years ago
Over a sweltering span of five days in July 1995, Chicago a city that once burned to ground had never felt hotter. Unprecedented heat and humidity plunged the city into crisis, with temperatures that peaked at 106 degrees and humidity that made it feel as hot as 120. Residents were wilting and desperate to cool down, blasting air conditioners if they had them and breaking open fire hydrants if they didnt, according to news reports at the time. Transformers failed, power outages grew and water pressure in some neighborhoods slowed to a dribble. Asphalt sizzled and rail lines buckled. Inside the brick two-flats and bungalows that line Chicago neighborhood streets, many residents particularly the poor and elderly slowly baked. The heat ebbed by July 17, but it would take months to get a clearer picture of its toll. When data emerged, the Cook County Medical Examiners Office said the heat wave had contributed to 465 deaths between July 14 and July 20. According to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health, the heat wave appears to have contributed to 254 more deaths than were attributed by the Cook County Medical Examiners Office. Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist who also says the official number was an undercount, called the heat oppressive. People felt trapped. Its a feeling I think a lot of people can relate to now that climate change has become so salient, said Klinenberg, whose 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago examined how systemic failures led to the highest weather-related death toll in city history. Some of the failures, including the social infrastructure Klinenberg assesses, are in worse shape than ever. And while attempts at decarbonization havent been nearly strong enough, Klinenberg said, one key difference 27 years after Chicagos deadliest heat wave is that the effects of climate change are all but impossible to ignore. Scientists said the past week has featured some of the hottest days on Earth in at least 125,000 years . Climate change has increased the frequency of intense heat domes, researchers say, boosting the odds of longer and more frequent heat waves. Several intense heat domes have contributed to heat records this summer in Texas, Mexico, India and China; another is developing in the southwestern United States this week. Phoenix is expected to see temperatures as high as 117 degrees this week, according to the National Weather Service, while it could get as hot as 110 degrees in parts of Californias central valley. Where extreme heat will pose the biggest threat: Look up your city Those conditions were similar to the ones that roasted the Windy City in 1995. Ordinarily, summer is the best thing about Chicago; the city blossoms in the summer, Klinenberg, a Chicago native, said. We suffer through the frigid winters to get to the blissful summers, and what Chicago felt like in 1995 felt like an oven, and you couldnt cool down. By July 13, the heat had been lingering in the 90s hot, but not unforeseen at the height of Chicago summer before peaking at 106 degrees that day. Despite the oppressive heat, some tried to shrug off the intensity: A college student told a local newspaper reporter the heat was typical for his native Singapore; Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley described it as another of the citys extremes, a counterbalance to the frigid winters he suggested were more dangerous than heat. The Chicago Cubs kept their regular schedule, playing the Cincinnati Reds before tens of thousands of fans at Wrigley Field all week. But signs that the city was rolling slow motion into a disaster were emerging among the citys first responders. Patients arriving at the ICU at Cook County Hospital made the scene look like Gone with the Wind Atlanta in 1864, Cory Franklin, who was the director of intensive care, told Chicago Magazine in a 20th-anniversary oral history of the crisis . The worst case was a construction worker. He had been working on a hot tar roof. He had a temperature of 111 and was in a coma when he came in. Klinenberg said the heat index , or how the typical person experiences the heat, went up to 126 degrees. Cities are heat islands, Klinenberg said, because their pavement and steel attract the heat and trap it in. Not only is the city hotter than outlying areas during the day, it stays hotter at night and doesnt cool off. In the tropical-like heat with air conditioners selling out at stores and then running full blast in homes, power company ComEd couldnt keep up with demand. Hundreds of thousands of residents lost power, sometimes for 48-hour stretches, Klinenberg said. What people forget about power outages, is that elevators dont work in high-rise buildings; water pumps dont get you water above the fifth or sixth floor, he said. So you have no air conditioning, you might not be able to flush your toilets, get water from the sink. In a summary of the heat wave, the National Weather Service described unusual atmospheric circumstances that raised temperatures up to 20 degrees above average and pushed the heat index as high as 125 degrees. The primary cause was an intense heat dome over the Midwest. (A heat dome is a sprawling zone of high pressure in the upper levels of the atmosphere that makes air sink, squashing cloud development and trapping heat beneath it.) By Friday, the citys hospitals were on a bypass system that allowed overcrowded facilities to turn away ambulances, but there was no central system for monitoring which emergency rooms were full; Klinenberg said that meant ambulances were driving for miles to find a place where people could get care. While patients were piling up in emergency rooms with heat stroke , organ failure and other heat-related illness, bodies were coming to the county morgue faster than the medical examiners staff could keep up. More than 100 bodies came in, prompting the city to commandeer a fleet of refrigerated trucks meant to be used at the Taste of Chicago food festival. Many victims were found dead in their homes, not even making it to the hospital in time for treatment, Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donaghue told reporters during a news conference at the time. We had an extraordinary number of deaths from the field, when the ambulances call us for medical control and pronounced many patients dead in the driveway over these few days. Klinenberg recalled hundreds of dead bodies turning up in apartments and single-occupancy dwellings throughout the city. When you have a massive heat wave, its not like a plane crash where you know how many people are on board and where the accident happened; it was a weird sense of horror where one body after the next would show up at the morgue because no one knew when it was going to end, he said. When the heat abated the following week, it became clear the highest death toll was on the older Black residents in a cluster of neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Though roughly an equal number of Black and White residents died, Black residents made up a smaller share of the citys population. After the heat wave, Chicago made dramatic changes to its emergency response, which have been widely adopted by other U.S. cities. Many cities now have an emergency response plan that is automatically triggered in extreme heat; in Chicago, that includes large community cooling centers and mobile units, like city buses, as well as a network for contacting elderly, homeless and otherwise vulnerable residents. About 46 percent of people in the United States experience an average of at least three consecutive days of 100-plus-degree weather each year, according to a 2022 Washington Post analysis of data published by the nonprofit First Street Foundation research organization. That figure is expected to rise to 63 percent in about 30 years. The number of such hot days in Chicago is expected to increase by 114 percent by that point, according to First Street . More dangerous heat waves are on the way: See the impact by Zip code. Klinenberg argues that while public officials view heat and other climate-related emergencies as real disasters and have responses in place, there are still challenges. Its getting hotter. We have hotter days, and more long-lasting heat waves, and its getting hotter in places that arent accustomed to hot weather, Klinenberg said. He added that physical infrastructure such as power grids are not equipped for the growing consumer demand and stress related to climate change. But the American social infrastructure is crumbling, he said. The United States has a larger elderly population now and more people living in isolation . One of the findings in my book was even when the hard infrastructure fails, as it often does, its our social infrastructure that keeps us alive and people who lived in neighborhoods that had solid social infrastructure were more likely to get help from family, neighbors and friends, he said. Klinenberg said cities should invest in parks, community gardens, libraries and other local public spaces that help us build communities and provide mutual support. This is a climate change story for sure, but its also a social story, he said. Dan Stillman contributed to this report. Our warming climate: In the Eastern U.S., the record-breaking heat wave is reaching is peaking. July was Earths hottest month , and heres where the worst, record-setting heat occurred . Use our tracker to see your citys extreme heat risk . Take a look at what extreme heat does to the human body . How to stay safe: Its better to prepare for extreme heat before youre in it. Heres our guide to bracing for a heat wave , tips for staying cool even if you dont have air conditioning , and what to know about animal safety during extreme heat . Traveling during a heat wave isnt ideal, but heres what to do if you are . Understanding the science: Sprawling zones of high pressure called heat domes fuel heat waves. Heres how they work . You can also read more about the link between weather disasters and climate change , and how leaders in the U.S. and Europe are responding to heat .