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| The big picture of what happened 20 years ago this week. Image provided by Pic2Fly.com |
Yet
aside from putting on the fan that sits near where I tend to write, my thoughts
were going back to that time 20 years ago.
BECAUSE
IT HAS been exactly two full decades since that five-day stretch of time in
mid-July 1995 when temperatures got so intense and people were caught so
off-guard that the number of heat-related deaths skyrocketed.
Some
485 people officially died in Chicago due to the hot weather, although the city
Health Department has acknowledged that as many as 739 people wound up dying
because of heat as a contributing factor.
Consider
that we the public got all worked up that about a dozen people were killed
during the Independence Day holiday weekend due to gunfire.
I’m
not diminishing the severity of that many homicides in the city. But we have to
be honest – that was one incredibly hot time-span. It’s not something any of us
wants to relive.
HOT
AS HELL? We’d have to ask a deceased politician’s soul to find out precisely
how hot the afterlife is for those of us who misbehaved during life on Earth.
The
most serious explanation I ever heard of what caused the intense heat was an
inadvertent shift in this planet’s weather patterns. For a couple of weeks in
July of ’95, Chicago became hit by the kind of heat that usually hits Saudi
Arabia. Just like our recent winters reached such record cold levels due to
Arctic-like blasts swooping down through Canada and hitting large swaths of the
United States.
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| The estimate turned out to be too low |
In
the Middle East, the locals have learned either how to tolerate the heat, or
how to make themselves more comfortable. We in Chicago were caught off guard.
Particularly
those amongst us who, for whatever reason, were inclined to live shut-in
lifestyles and to think of air conditioning as some sort of stupid luxury for
mental weaklings.
MANY
OF THOSE amongst the hundreds who died fell into that category.
Which
is why many of Chicago’s efforts to make “cooling centers” easily available to
the public date back to the mid-1990s; just like that winter storm we always
say took down Michael Bilandic as mayor and made future officials wary of the
idea of letting the streets get too sloppy from snow and ice.
We
don’t want a repeat of so many people being found dead in their apartments – so
many people that the Cook County medical examiner’s office gave us the image of
freezer trucks having to be parked outside their West Side offices to accommodate
all the bodies that had to be processed.
Now
I have to admit; I don’t have first-hand memories. Because back in that decade,
I was living and working in Springfield, Ill. I usually joke about how I’m a
native Chicago soccer fan who missed the sight of the World Cup in ’94 and the
opening ceremonies being held at Soldier Field.
YET
I FEEL fortunate that this was something I merely heard about on news reports
while enduring a more reasonable summer sweat while working at the Statehouse.
Although
I still remember talking to my own mother, who told me how my brother took her
out to movie theaters just about every single day during that heat peak so they
could enjoy the air conditioning.
She
felt comfortable, even though she later joked about the agony of having to endure the sight of a lot of
crummy films.
Which
I’m sure is the kind of story we’d like to be hearing from those hundreds of
people who did die because they didn’t have a place to go to help them cope
with the hundred degree-plus temperatures that we got 20 years ago this week.
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