As record temperatures bake portions of the United States this summer, a Chicago heat wave in 1995 offers a grim preview of the toll from climate change.
“Ordinarily, summer is the best thing about Chicago; the city blossoms in the summer,” Klinenberg, a Chicago native, said. “We suffer through the frigid winters to get to the blissful summers, and what Chicago felt like in 1995 felt like an oven, and you couldn’t cool down.”
Patients arriving at the ICU at Cook County Hospital made the scene look like “‘Gone with the Wind’ Atlanta in 1864,” Cory Franklin, who was the director of intensive care, told “What people forget about power outages, is that elevators don’t work in high-rise buildings; water pumps don’t get you water above the fifth or sixth floor,” he said. “So you have no air conditioning, you might not be able to flush your toilets, get water from the sink.”of the heat wave, the National Weather Service described unusual atmospheric circumstances that raised temperatures up to 20 degrees above average and pushed the heat index as high as 125 degrees.
Klinenberg recalled hundreds of dead bodies turning up in apartments and single-occupancy dwellings throughout the city.
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