The Chicago Heat Wave: Summer of 1995

Last night for homework, we were assigned a reading about the chicago heat wave and today in class we discussed it. When our teacher asked us if any of us knew if our parents remembered the Chicago heat wave and some of the parents didn't even remember it. When I asked my mom, she said that she remembered it but the worst thing about it was the fact that it took a while to cool her car down at first. She said it was really hot but it never really effected her, she lived in Lincoln Park. It is interesting to hear two completely different sides of the same story, one side being my mother's and the other side being what we learned about in the reading and what we discussed in class today.


Something that we talked about in class today was the fact that in Illinois, over 600 people died (I can't remember the exact number) due to heat. In other states, the number of people that dies due to heat were around 20 or below, most didn't even have any deaths. This really says something important to me. In one of the clips we watched in class, someone brought up that Chicago even had a Catastrophe plan that wasn't followed through with soon enough. People were breaking fire hydrants to cool down, causing their neighbors to lose water pressure. This was also a major issue, but only in neighborhoods with a lot of people below the poverty line. These are the neighborhoods with the most deaths due to heat related causes. In the clips that we watched in class, the people talked about the temperature and it was getting up to 104˚, which is really hot but it didn't break the record nor should it cause any harm to people. But I think that one of the main reasons so many people died was because there was no water pressure. People need water to survive, it is a basic human need, but with no water, and when people lived far away from the lake, a lot of people can die from hydration and other heat related causes. Also, when the heat wave was first being introduced (meaning we watched a clip from the first day of the heat wave) not so many people were dying so the city of Chicago didn't regard the heat wave as a huge issue. But when we watched a video later on during the heat wave, everyone was freaking out because there was no water pressure and a ton of people were dying. By the time the attention was drawn to the problem and action was taken, it was too late to fully stop what was going on. So clearly Chicago had a plan for if something like this happened, but the way they carried through with the plan really does not reflect a good image on Chicago, and just showed that we don't really know what to do in a state of panic nor can we tell when there is a problem! Or at least can't tell if there is a problem until it is too late.