UNITED STATES: Chicago Heat Wave Raises Temperature for Changes

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Jul 26 1995 (IPS) - The United States has been hot this month — so hot that hundreds of people in Chicago may have been killed, and hot enough that people are clamouring for a change.

A heat wave that has racked 19 U.S. states, hit the population of Chicago especially hard. By Jul. 13, temperatures in that the third-largest U.S. city had reached 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

Chicago’s Department of Human Services (DHS) estimates that by this week, more than 450 people had died from heat-related causes. In some parts of the city’s poor, largely black South Side, funerals are held hourly for the victims.

Most of the dead have been people over 55 years old who lacked air-conditioning and suffered from heat exhaustion, dehydration or other heat-related conditions.

“We’re still finding bodies,” Carmelo Vargas, the DHS director of emergency services, said Monday.

The death toll, scarcely imaginable for a first-world city, has sparked a wave of finger-pointing as well as protestations from officials that the number is inaccurate.

“Every day, people die of natural causes,” Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said. “You can’t put everything as heat-related.”

The officials contend that DHS has sought to count almost every elderly or impoverished person who died last week as a heat fatality. But Edmund Donoghue, the country’s medical examiner, countered, “If anything, it is possible we’re underestimating the number of deaths.”

The anger over the deaths has resulted in a growing call for U.S. heat crises to receive the same response as fires, snowstorms, or other natural disasters.

“The lack of action by the city administration and the pass- the-buck mentality of Mayor Daley resulted in a gaping, bottomless hole in Chicago’s safety net for the elderly,” said Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois. “Unfortunately, too many of our senior citizens fell into that hole.”

“It’s certainly traumatic,” said Chester Hartman of the Washington-based Poverty and Race Research Action Council. “It’s conceivable that a new level of consciousness and responsibility comes out of this.”

Chicago is now moving to adopt heat emergency procedures, first devised by St. Louis, Missouri during a similar 1980 crisis. Many of the states hit by the current wave are also improving their heat emergency capabilities.

Most crucially, all the deaths — including about a dozen in Washington, at least 18 in New York, and more than 80 in Milwaukee — have made people see extreme heat as a crisis.

“There’s a perception now that air-conditioning becomes a necessary standard for people, rather than a luxury,” Hartman said. This could prompt officials nationwide to consider setting up housing codes to prevent buildings from becoming too hot, as there are now to prevent them from becoming too cold.

“I doubt there’s a housing code in the country that regulates steps to be taken at a maximum temperature,” although there are penalties if temperatures fall below a minimum during cold weather, he argued.

Chicago officials have quickly cobbled together a ‘heat emergency’ plan to track extreme conditions. Once the weather is too hot in places without air-conditioning or other facilities, people should move to city-run ‘cooling centres’.

“You have emergency centres set up in floods, hurricanes, fires…But this is the first discussion I’ve seen of cooling centres, which is an excellent idea,” Hartman said.

He suggested that cities wracked by heat waves could subsidise churches or community centres to take in people, possibly by paying for their air-conditioning and other expenses.

But other urban experts dispute the idea of having the government take responsibility for heat disasters.

“I don’t think it’s something the government can combat,” said Jim Hecimovich, the Chicago-based assistant research director for the American Planning Association. “Even for cooling centres, how would they identify the people (who needed to go)? It’s impossible.”

Chicago officials cannot do much more than provide a ‘heat watch’ of weather conditions, Hecimovich said, noting that ultimately, it was local communities who needed to keep an eye on the elderly.

The major problem, Hecimovich said, was that “most people just don’t consider four or five days of hot weather in the same way as a snowstorm.”

That may change. But some bitterness may linger over why so many poor people — and a high number of black people — died.

“Why Chicago?” Hartman asked. “Was it that much hotter than anywhere else? Or was it something else?”