Political Heat
The great Chicago heat wave, and other unnatural disasters.
by Malcolm Gladwell August 12, 2002
n the first week of July, 1995, a strong high-pressure air mass developed over the plains of the Southwest and began moving slowly eastward toward Chicago. Illinois usually gets its warm summer air from the Gulf of Mexico, and the air coming off the ocean is relatively temperate. But this was a blast of western air that had been baked in the desert ovens of West Texas and New Mexico. It was hot, bringing temperatures in excess of a hundred degrees, and, because the preceding two months had been very wet in the Midwest and the ground was damp, the air steadily picked up moisture as it moved across the farmlands east of the Rockies. Ordinarily, this would not have been a problem, since humid air tends to become diluted as it mixes with the drier air higher up in the atmosphere. But it was Chicago's misfortune, in mid-July, to be in the grip of an unusually strong temperature inversion: the air in the first thousand feet above the city surface was cooler than the air at two and three thousand feet. The humid air could not rise and be diluted. It was trapped by the warmer air above. The United States has cities that are often humid—like Houston and New Orleans—without being tremendously hot. And it has very hot cities—like Las Vegas and Phoenix—that are almost never humid. But for one long week, beginning on Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicago was both. Meteorologists measure humidity with what is called the dew point—the point at which the air is so saturated with moisture that it cannot cool without forming dew. On a typical Chicago summer day, the dew point is in the low sixties, and on a very warm, humid day it is in the low seventies. At Chicago's Midway Airport, during the heat wave of 1995, the dew point hit the low eighties—a figure reached regularly only in places like the coastal regions of the Middle East. In July of 1995, Chicago effectively turned into Dubai.
As the air mass settled on the city, cars began to overheat and stall in the streets. Roads buckled. Hundreds of children developed heat exhaustion when school buses were stuck in traffic. More than three thousand fire hydrants were opened in poorer neighborhoods around the city, by people looking for relief from the heat, and this caused pressure to drop so precipitately that entire buildings were left without water. So many air-conditioners were turned on that the city's electrical infrastructure was overwhelmed. A series of rolling blackouts left thousands without power. As the heat took its toll, the city ran out of ambulances. More than twenty hospitals, mostly on Chicago's poorer South Side, shut their doors to new admissions. Callers to 911 were put on hold, and as the police and paramedics raced from one home to another it became clear that the heat was killing people in unprecedented numbers. The police took the bodies to the Cook County Medical Examiner's office, and a line of cruisers stretched outside the building. Students from a nearby mortuary school, and then ex-convicts looking to earn probation points, were brought in to help. The morgue ran out of bays in which to put the bodies. Office space was cleared. It wasn't enough. The owner of a local meatpacking firm offered the city his refrigerated trucks to help store the bodies. The first set wasn't enough. He sent another. It wasn't enough. In the end, there were nine forty-eight-foot meatpacking trailers in the morgue's parking lot. When the final statistics were tallied, the city calculated that in the seven days between July 14th and July 20th, the heat wave had resulted in the deaths of seven hundred and thirty-nine Chicagoans; on Saturday, July 15th, alone, three hundred and sixty-five people died from the heat. The chance intersection of a strong high-pressure ridge, a wet spring, and an intense temperature inversion claimed more lives than Hurricane Andrew, the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the Northridge, California, earthquake combined.
...
Klinenberg tells the story of Pauline Jankowitz, an elderly woman living alone in a third-floor apartment in a transitional neighborhood. Her air-conditioner was old and didn't work well. She had a bladder problem that left her incontinent, and she had to walk with a crutch because she had a weak leg. That made it difficult for her to get down the stairs, and once she was outside she was terrified of being mugged. "Chicago is just a shooting gallery," she said to Klinenberg. She left her apartment only about six times a year. Jankowitz was the prototypical heat-wave victim, and, as she told Klinenberg, that week in July was "the closest I've ever come to death." But she survived. A friend had told her to leave her apartment if it got too hot; so, early on what would turn out to be the worst of the seven days, she rose and crept down the stairs. She caught a city bus to a nearby store, which was air-conditioned, and there she bought fresh cherries and leaned on the shopping cart until she recovered her strength. On the trip home, she recalled, "climbing the stairs was almost impossible." Back in her apartment, she felt her body begin to swell and go numb. She telephoned a friend. She turned a fan on high, lay down on the floor, covered herself with wet towels, and dreamed that she was on a Caribbean cruise. She was poor and old and infirm, but she lived, and one of the many lessons of her story is that in order to survive that week in July she suddenly depended on services and supports that previously she had barely needed at all. Her old air-conditioner was useless most of the time. But that week it helped to keep her apartment at least habitable. She rarely travelled. But on that day the fact that there was a city bus, and that it came promptly and that it was air-conditioned, was of the greatest importance. She rarely went to the store; she had her groceries delivered. But now the proximity of a supermarket, where she could lean on the shopping cart and breathe in the cool air, was critical. Pauline Jankowitz's life depended not on the ordinary workings of the social institutions in her world but on their ability to perform at one critical moment of peak demand. On the hottest of all days, her neighborhood substation did not fail. Her bus came. Her grocery store was open. She was one of the lucky ones. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/08/12/020812crbo_books?currentPage=all:)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
