Chicago When It Sizzles
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Hello everyone. Just popping up before we start, to note the debt this episode owes to Eric Klinenberg's book, Heatwave, which you'll hear cited several times. It's the definitive account of the disaster we describe, and I couldn't have written this episode without it. Klinenberg helped reframe what a natural disaster actually is, and I've drawn extensively on his reporting and his thesis. A revised edition of Heatwave was published just a few years ago. I suggest that you pick up a copy.

At half past three on a Wednesday afternoon, the 12th of July 1995, Chicago's branch of the National Weather Service issued an advisory.

it was going to get hot. No kidding. It's Chicago in July. As a local TV weatherman put it, we saw the heat coming for some time, but you were almost ridiculed when you'd say, hey, it's really going to get hot. But it was really going to get hot.

The temperature had already hit 97 degrees. The next day, the Thursday, was worse. At Midway Airport, it was 106 degrees. And it was humid, like being wrapped in hot towels. It felt like 125 degrees.

To have a temperature of 104 and a dew point in the low 80s and not pop a thunderstorm was pretty extraordinary, said the weatherman. A thunderstorm's function in nature is to be the air conditioner. Nature's air conditioners weren't working that week. There was no thunderstorm, nor was there a cooling breeze from Lake Michigan to the north and east. Instead, hot, wet air was slowly oozing over Chicago from the southwest.

Stores sold out of air conditioners. "This is the kind of weather we pray for," said one appliance manufacturer. The lucky folk who did have air conditioners turned them up to the max. Those who didn't went to the beach or a municipal pool. People took boat trips out onto the lake. Trips which were abandoned because passengers were becoming dehydrated and ill.

As neighbourhood streets baked like ovens, some people set up sprinklers. Others illegally opened fire hydrants to provide a little relief and a little joy. Less joyfully, pelted workmen with rocks and bricks when they tried to shut them off. The pressure in Chicago's water mains started to fall. The next day, Friday, was still over 100 degrees and the stress on the city was growing. Cars were breaking down, roads buckling.

City crews were hosing down lifting bridges across the Chicago River to prevent them jamming as the metal expanded. But the mayor, Richard Daley, tried to reassure people. "Let's not blow it out of proportion," he said. "It's very, very, very hot." But then he added, "It was just one of those crazy weather days, like a winter blizzard." Yes, we go to extremes in Chicago and that's why people love Chicago. We go to extremes.

It wasn't like a winter blizzard, which Chicago could fix by sending out the snow ploughs. The heatwave was subtler, more surprising, more deadly. Even for a city of extremes, there are limits to what can be endured. The heatwave was about to push Chicago through those limits. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

On Friday afternoon, it was hot everywhere. But few places were hotter than the inside of Transmission Substation 114 on Addison Street in northwest Chicago. TSS 114 was a set of large transformers, 20 feet high, 15 feet across, which stepped high voltage electricity down to domestic voltages.

TSS 114 was hot because the transformers were operating well above their design capacity, which means they were throwing off heat. The temperature outside was well over 100 degrees. The temperature inside the substation didn't bear thinking about. At 4:56pm, a safety device overheated and shut down one of a set of four transformers. The other three began to work even harder.

At 5:47pm, a different safety device simply caught fire and a second transformer failed. The third and fourth transformers didn't last long. 49,000 customers lost electricity for the next 24 hours. And TSS114 was merely the most serious of more than 1,300 electrical equipment failures during the heatwave. The power loss took out the air conditioning, of course.

But it also took out the elevators in high-rises, often the hottest buildings and often a place where elderly people would live. And it took out the lights, both inside and outside. The whole area was dark, recalled the TV weatherman. People were walking around with flashlights. I've driven down Addison Street for I don't know how many decades. I didn't recognise it.

On Friday evening, as utility workers scrambled in vain to stop the lights going out, Edmund Donoghue, the chief medical examiner for the Chicago area, Cook County, received a phone call from his office. Dr. Donoghue, we just wanted to inform you that there are 40 autopsy cases on the list for tomorrow. 40 cases? I can't ever remember 40 cases. Why? I think they're dying of the heat, sir. When Donoghue arrived at the morgue the next morning...

There were 100. And the bodies kept coming. Late that morning, city health officials declared a heat emergency. Every ambulance and every paramedic in the city was called in to work. It wasn't enough. At hospitals across the city, overwhelmed emergency rooms began to turn people away. What gave the Chicago heat wave the potential to be so deadly was the combination of heat and humidity.

This is measured by something called a wet bulb thermometer. A wet bulb thermometer is wrapped in damp cloth, which ordinarily would cool down the thermometer a lot as the water evaporates. But in humid conditions, the water evaporates slowly and the bulb isn't cooled much. The human body is cooled by the evaporation of sweat from the skin. So the wet bulb thermometer provides a direct measure of how well the body's cooling system can work.

At a wet bulb temperature of 95 degrees, sweating simply cannot cool your skin below 95 degrees. Your body's core temperature rises, your liver fails, your muscles and other organs quickly deteriorate. Such conditions will kill pretty much anyone within hours. Even at a wet bulb temperature of 80 degrees, sweating will barely keep your core temperature stable if you're physically active.

It hit 85 degrees during the heatwave. That was a serious risk for any frail or elderly person who lacked air conditioning. By Saturday evening, there were 269 bodies at the Cook County morgue. That was more than the morgue's refrigerators could hold. What would they do with the corpses? One of the secretaries at the morgue remembered a role-playing exercise they'd once done. Imagining mass casualties as Chicago was hit by a nerve gas attack.

Well, they didn't have the nerve gas, but they did have the mass casualties. During that exercise, someone had said he'd be able to provide refrigerated trucks if the morgue's cold storage was overwhelmed. The secretary found that guy's number and made the call. Before long, a couple of refrigerated trucks rolled up in the parking lot, courtesy of a local meatpacking firm. It was a bad look, but what choice did they have?

Exhausted staff began to carry the bodies through the baking heat of the parking lot and out into the cold meat trucks. But the dead were still coming in. Carried by ambulances and police cars, Ed Donoghue's team realised they were going to need more of those trucks. Mayor Daley had said that people love Chicago because we go to extremes.

Now Chicago's hospitals were being tested to the extreme. So was the water system, drained of pressure by the sprinklers and the hydrants. So was its electricity supply, pressed beyond the limit as every air conditioning unit in the city was cranked up. Pauline Jankovic was being tested to the extreme too. Pauline's malfunctioning air conditioner wasn't much use, and her apartment was turning into a sauna.

She wasn't too tempted to go outside, however. Pauline's neighbourhood scared her. "Chicago is just a shooting gallery," she said. "I'm a moving target because I walk so slowly." Pauline lived up on the third floor by choice. "If I were on the first floor, I'd be even more vulnerable to a break-in." Pauline, who was in her 80s, suffered from both a weak bladder and a weak leg. Straying far from the toilet felt risky and embarrassing.

She had to walk with a crutch and as she said, she couldn't move fast. The simple act of getting down several flights of stairs to street level and then back up again was an ordeal. She didn't do it often. But Pauline wasn't completely isolated. She had friends she could call any time she wanted to talk.

As the temperature rose, Pauline spoke to one of those friends who urged her to get out of the steam room atmosphere of her apartment if it got too hot. On what proved to be the hottest day of the year, Pauline resolved to do just what her friend had said. She rose early and slowly, quietly limped down the stairs. The sheer effort was exhausting. She was tempted to turn around and head back to the apartment.

But she gathered herself and stepped out onto the street. She waited for a city bus, which took her to a local store. It was an oasis, fully air-conditioned. Pauline took her time, leaning against her shopping cart. Revitalised by the cool air, she bought some cherries, her favourite treat. Then, having built her strength, she slowly walked back to the bus stop, then rode the bus until she got back to her apartment building.

It was almost impossible to get back up the stairs. Her age, her weak leg, and above all the heat, made those few flights an almost insuperable obstacle. Back in the steaming apartment, there was no escape from the heat. Sweat beaded on her skin but did not evaporate. The air conditioning unit sputtered ineffectually. Pauline called her friend again. She was getting dizzy, she said. She could see her hands were swelling up.

They felt numb and that sensation was spreading. Her friend kept talking to her. Then Pauline said, I'm just going to dunk my head in some water, maybe get some wet towels. Just stay on the line for me. Pauline's friend waited and listened down the phone line. She could hear the water running. Then she could hear Pauline shuffling slowly around the apartment. Was that the whir of a fan? She waited and waited.

The fan kept whirring, but there was no longer any sound from Pauline. Cautionary tales will return after the break. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry, and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So, buckle up.

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As the bodies began to pile up at the Cook County morgue, the chief medical examiner, Edmund Donoghue, started to raise the alarm. The heatwave was much more than an inconvenience. It was killing people. Hundreds of people. With ambulances overwhelmed, hospitals turning people away, and the elderly far more vulnerable than the young, it was an eerie glimpse of more recent health crises.

And so of course, the political heat was rising too. Politicians complained that when medics such as Edmund Donoghue wrongly attributed natural deaths to the heatwave, they were playing politics and exaggerating the crisis. Mayor Daley protested: "You cannot claim that everybody who's died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat."

But Donoghue wasn't claiming that everyone who showed up at the Cook County morgue had died of heat, just that a large number of them had. Otherwise, why had the death rate spiked so dramatically? Why were there now nine, count them, nine huge meat trucks lined up in the morgue's parking lot, each full of bodies? And despite the haunting sight of those trucks, there were also grumbles that the whole thing was a media concoction.

Did people die of the heat or just in the heat? And some commentators observed that those who had died, generally elderly and also often black and poor, would have died soon anyway. The near legendary local colonist Mike Royko wrote a piece titled "Killer Heatwave or a Media Event?" Royko argued that Chicago had always had heatwaves. What was special about this one?

He wrote: Sound familiar?

And yet, while Roy Coe's argument has the ring of plausibility about it, he's turned the truth on its head, hasn't he? The media yawn at heatwaves. They're much more interested in tornadoes or volcanoes or terrorist attacks, something that looks good on film. Just imagine that a plane had crashed at O'Hare airport, killing a couple of hundred people. It would have been a huge news event. The reporters and the cameras would have rushed to the scene immediately.

Veterans at the Cook County morgue didn't need to imagine that scenario. They could remember it. Sixteen years earlier, a passenger jet had crashed at O'Hare and 273 people had died. To the morgue workers, the situation they faced in the heatwave wasn't much different. 273 victims of the plane crash, 269 corpses at the morgue by Saturday night.

And for the Cook County morgue, things got worse. Because people kept coming in for day after day after day. Eventually the heat would kill nearly three times as many people as the plane crash. It was as though an airliner had crashed on the Friday. The morgue workers and the emergency services had worked heroically for 24 hours. And then the call came in.

there's been another crash. Expect another two or three hundred casualties. And a day or so later, you won't believe it, but there's been a third catastrophe at O'Hare. A triple plane crash with more than 700 fatalities would have been almost unthinkable. Can you imagine the headlines? Eventually, journalists started to catch on to the heatwave and TV helicopters flew over the Cook County morgue's parking lot

capturing that ghoulish footage of the line of refrigerated trucks. But other disasters of the same era received far more coverage. For example, the Loma Prieta earthquake, which in 1989 killed 69 people in San Francisco and Oakland. 69 deaths is a disaster, of course. But the eventual death toll in Chicago was 739.

After trying to blame Dr Donoghue, city authorities tried a different tack. Blame the victims. The problem, said one city official, was that people didn't look after themselves and didn't accept help. We did everything possible, he said, but some people didn't want to open their doors to us. That was a clever attempt to imply that city workers were knocking on the door of every vulnerable person. They weren't.

Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention later concluded that the city government didn't deploy enough street-level workers. Still, the victim-blaming excuse touches on an important truth. A lot of people didn't want to open their doors, whether to city workers or to their neighbours. One survivor, an elderly resident named Bob Greblo, explained...

If someone comes to the door, I won't open it. I'll talk through the door because you never know. You never know. At the Friday peak of the heatwave, the local news channel had led its evening broadcast with a warning. Not of the deadly heat, but that opening your window might allow thieves to break into your apartment. Bob wouldn't go out either. That was risking both himself and the apartment he left behind.

Easy for city officials to complain that people wouldn't open their doors.

But people like Bob had good reason to fear the outside world. As the great urban observer Jane Jacobs told the Chicago Sun-Times back then, it took a lot of effort to make people this isolated. Of course, not everyone was isolated. Chicago's a buzzing city. Here are longtime residents singing its praises.

People stay here because they like walking to the stores. They can get their food here. They can go to the bakery. Kids are out. Old people are out. People are shopping. There's really no need to get in the car and go anywhere. You can certainly do things within walking distance, and people do.

This bustling city was full of air-conditioned spaces. Many of them, such as libraries and shops, open to anyone, free of charge. They could and did make space for the frail and the elderly to take shelter from the heat. So why didn't vulnerable people just stroll to the local store and hang out there where it was cool? Bob Greblo could tell you, it's too dangerous out there. I've nowhere that I want to go.

In the years after the heatwave, a young sociologist named Eric Klinenberg spent time with vulnerable people in Chicago communities, examined the statistics on the death toll, and interviewed people with a wide variety of perspectives. His book, Heatwave, is the definitive account of what went wrong under the surface of the catastrophe.

The most striking thing Klinenberg did was to contrast two adjacent Chicago neighbourhoods: South Lawndale and North Lawndale. On paper, both neighbourhoods had looked vulnerable, with lots of impoverished elderly people living alone. Both were mostly non-white, another possible indicator of vulnerability.

And yet North Lawndale had a heatwave death rate ten times higher than South Lawndale. "We go to extremes," the mayor had said. And this difference truly was extreme. So why had South Lawndale, so similar on paper, been largely spared when North Lawndale had suffered so badly? But talking to local people about their lives, the explanation was clear.

North Lawndale, where Bob Greblo lived, was depopulated. It was an urban desert, pockmarked with vacant lots. Gangs used it as a convenient place to sell drugs. One resident had remembered his neighbours hanging out on sweltering nights in the 1950s. We used to sit outside all night and just talk. But that wasn't possible in 1995, not with bullets flying.

Big employers such as International Harvester, Sears Roebuck and Western Electric had moved away and shops had closed. The streets of North Lawndale felt deserted. Elderly people were afraid of being robbed when they went out and afraid that their homes would be ransacked in their absence. They weren't used to walking to local shops and there weren't many local shops to walk to.

South Lawndale was equally poor, but it was overcrowded rather than deserted. As a result, it felt bustling and safe. You could step outside your door any time and there would be folk around. Those happy Chicago residents we heard from a couple of minutes ago, walking around, visiting the bakery, they lived in South Lawndale.

South Lawndale resident Frank Crook spent his whole life there. I'm not afraid of my neighbourhood, said Frank. We walk in the streets in the middle of the night when we come home. He sounds so different to Bob or Pauline, doesn't he? When the heatwave struck. Of course, Frank and the other old-timers were happy to walk into an air-conditioned store nearby and hang out.

they felt safe leaving an empty apartment behind. When at home, they felt safe opening their doors to the people who came to check on them. In a heatwave, lively streets save lives. When the great Jane Jacobs summarised Eric Klinenberg's findings, she highlighted something so mundane that it's easy to overlook. In each neighbourhood, when the crisis struck, people kept behaving as they had before.

North Lawndale didn't have a functioning community. South Lawndale did. When the crisis came, that meant that ten times as many people died in desolate North Lawndale than they did in the bustling neighbourhood to the south. Cautionary Tales will return in a moment.

I love cycling and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe. Which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble, with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it,

And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.

Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,

Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis and even their extensive archives. So where

Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today. Recovering the Bodies

was a horrific job. One of the hundreds of victims was found when the police got his door open on the 19th of July, a week after the first heat warnings. Male, age 79, black. Victim did not respond to phone calls or knocks on victim's door since Sunday 16th July, '95. Victim was known as quiet to himself and at times not to answer the door.

What was that 79-year-old thinking before he passed out in the heat? Did he think of the outside world like Bob Greblo did? If someone comes to the door, I won't open it. I'll talk through the door because you never know. Did he fondly remember the 1950s, when people could hang out with their neighbours? We used to sit outside all night and just talk. We can only guess. Like many of the 739 people who died, he was voiceless and alone.

The police report continues. Remember what Jane Jacobs had said.

It took a lot of effort to make people this isolated. As the heatwave hit, it was easy to see the physical infrastructure failing. The power cuts, the cracking roads, the trickling water mains and the buckling bridges. But the physical infrastructure was straining all over the city. It doesn't explain the difference between people like the nameless 79-year-old, far from neighbourhood stores, too frightened to open the door,

and people such as Frank Crook, who had neighbours checking in on them, and who thought nothing of strolling out to cool down in a local grocery store. Remember that the death rate in North Lawndale was ten times as high as the death rate in South Lawndale. The North Lawndale residents who died weren't killed by a failure of physical infrastructure around them, but by a failure of the social infrastructure. That's much harder to see,

to measure or to fix. But the failure was all around them, constraining every single day of their lives. Heat continues to be a killer. The World Health Organization estimates that between 1998 and 2017, 166,000 people died owing to heat waves. Yet they rarely get the attention that we would devote to a volcano, a tsunami or a wildfire.

And because the global climate is changing, extreme heat waves are becoming much more common. Events that we might expect once in 50,000 years, we might now see every decade or so. So we're going to have to get used to scorching temperatures and smothering humidity. And that makes it all the more important to understand what happened in Chicago a quarter of a century ago. We can't prevent heat waves, but there's a lot we can do to make them less dangerous.

The physical shape of neighbourhoods can make them heatwave-prone or heatwave-resistant. A city block with tarmac and concrete, little shade and rapid drainage of water can be several degrees hotter than one with a shade of trees or patches of vegetation that catch water and let it evaporate. Leafy neighbourhoods tend to be a great deal cooler, and it will surprise nobody to hear that leafy neighbourhoods also tend to be richer.

A recent study in the journal Climate found that historically red-lined areas in US cities are an average of 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. These areas are mostly African-American, denied federal mortgage support in the 1930s and long marginalised afterwards. North Lawndale is one of them. But while this is all so depressing, doesn't it also offer some hope?

When we think about adapting to climate change, we often think of expensive defences such as dikes and flood barriers, or waterproofing power and transport infrastructure so that it copes better with extreme conditions. For some places, that's a cost we're going to have to swallow. But the experience of Chicago suggests that there's another kind of adaptation, another kind of weatherproofing.

supporting vibrant neighbourhoods, planting trees and laying out parks, reducing crime and encouraging local businesses, funding libraries and community centres. I'm not saying it's easy to turn a failing neighbourhood into a thriving one, but I am saying that it's the kind of thing we'd want to do anyway. The flourishing community of South Lawndale protected its vulnerable residents in a way that the threadbare community of North Lawndale didn't.

just couldn't. But that wasn't some expensive precaution that paid off only in a crisis. It was a natural consequence of the way South Lawndale worked every hour of every day, making it a far happier, healthier, safer place to live. Pauline Jankovic, remember, was isolated and afraid, but she had a friend she could call. When we left Pauline, she'd gone quiet. Her friend was on the other end of the telephone, waiting.

increasingly anxious. At last, Pauline came back on the line. She was okay. Pauline had been dipping her head in water, then brought wet towels back to the bed. She turned on her fan and lay down under the towels with the fan blowing over her. She lost track of time a bit, then remembered that her friend was still on the line. Thanks for waiting for me. I feel a lot better now. I'm going to keep using the towels and the fan. It's working. And it was working.

Pauline hung up, lay down again and waited to regain her strength. Looking back, she laughed about it. She told the sociologist Eric Klinenberg: "I have a special way to beat the heat. I like to go on a Caribbean cruise. I get several washcloths and dip them in cold water. Then I place them over my eyes so that I can't see. I lie down and set the fan directly on me.

The wet towels and the wind from the fan give a cool breeze. I imagine myself on a cruise around the islands. Even in the humidity, the towels and the fan help. But so do the friends. My friends know about my cruises too. So when they call me on hot days, they all say, "Hi Pauline, how was your trip?" We laugh about it, but it keeps me alive. But what if the virtual cruise hadn't worked? What if Pauline had passed out?

Her friend was still on the line. She'd have called the ambulance. "Don't just knock on the door," she'd have said. "Break it down." "I know she's in there. I was talking to her when she stopped responding." Pauline was vulnerable and she was isolated. But she had someone looking out for her. Someone she could trust. Everybody should. But in Chicago, not everybody did. The last 41 victims of the Chicago heat wave were buried six weeks later in a mass grave.

160 feet long. They were so alone that even after death, nobody came to claim them. 41 simple pine boxes were laid side by side in the six foot deep trench. Each had a brass tag with a number. County investigators had tried to track down the families of each victim for them to arrange a funeral. Often they'd succeeded. These 41 were the ones who were left. Edward Hoffman, Leonard Hymer,

Lisa Kimberley, Paul Ozienczewicz, Lydia Payne, Thomas Randall, William Reidsville, Robert Yankovic, Ethel Young. Sometimes no family member could be found. Sometimes the family didn't want to get involved. A few people had shown up to bear witness during the brief service. Some were solemn, some angry, some were simply sobbing. If any of these living knew any of the dead,

They did not admit it. Eric Klinenberg's book is Heatwave. For a full list of our sources, see timharford.com. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright.

It's produced by Ryan Dilley, with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane,

John Schnarz, Julia Barton, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Royston Berserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Morano, Daniela Lacaune and Maya Koenig.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell a friend, tell two friends. And if you want to hear the show ads-free and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts, then sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

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