Deaths of three Chicago women prompt urgent heat warnings

Temperatures barely climbed into the 90s and only for a couple of days. But the discovery of the bodies of three women inside a Chicago senior housing facility this month left the city looking for answers to questions that were supposed to be addressed decades ago and are causing alarm as the planet heats.

He wrote Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago about the 1995 heatwave in the city on Lake Michigan that killed more than 700 people.

The city council member whose ward includes the neighborhood where the building is located said she had experienced stifling temperatures in the complex when she visited, including in one unit where heat sensors hit 102F.

Part of the problem, experts say, is that communities nationwide are still learning how deadly heat can be, as global heating accelerates, disrupting norms.

In Chicago, it took the sight of refrigerated trucks being filled with bodies after the 1995 heatwave to communicate that the city was woefully unprepared for a silent and invisible disaster that took more than twice as many lives as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

That realization led to a system in which city workers start calling older and more vulnerable people and turn city buildings into 24-hour cooling centers when temperatures become oppressive.

Wellenius said statistics show that while well over 80% of homes in cities such as Dallas and Phoenix have air conditioning, the percentage is far lower in cities such as Boston and New York.

And in the Pacific north-west, the percentage is even lower, something that came into stark relief in Oregon, Washington and western Canada last June, when temperatures climbed as high as 118F, killing 600 people or more.