With the Great Chicago Fire Festival of the last couple years, the city made a peculiar spectacle of the anniversary of one of our worst disasters. City Hall poured cold water on the fest earlier this month by cutting off funding after this year, but perhaps the money would be better spent on an effort to commemorate a more recent catastrophe: the 1995 heat wave. Not to celebrate the five July days that left 739 people dead—but to prevent anything like it from happening again.
But we still don’t have the same kind of warning systems that we do for hurricanes.
Who bore the brunt of this disaster? In Heat Wave you compare different pairs of Chicago neighborhoods—Auburn Gresham and Englewood, Little Village and North Lawndale—that are in some ways demographically similar but whose populations were very differently affected. Why were neighborhoods like Englewood more vulnerable than neighborhoods like Auburn Gresham?
This is where the politics get real thorny. The City Council refused to hold hearings about what happened. Instead there was a mayoral commission of handpicked experts who issued a report about what went wrong. The report had many useful recommendations, which the city has now implemented, and I applaud the city for that. But it also neglected to treat a number of important issues. Most cynically, the report was called something like “The Mayor’s Report on Extreme Weather.” It had an image of a snowflake on the cover. The phrase “heat wave” does not occur.
What doesn’t Chicago have? Does anyone in Chicago think utilities like ComEd are prepared for the kind of demand that you will see if there’s a heat wave that lasts not three days but two weeks or three weeks? I don’t think anybody in Chicago believes that. Does anyone in Chicago think that city services are providing better support for very poor, old, vulnerable people, especially those who live in the most depleted and dangerous neighborhoods? I don’t think anyone Chicago believes that.
