Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago by Eric Klinenberg, University of Chicago Press, 拢17.50, ISBN 0226443213 Reviewed by Fred Pearce
JULY is hot in Chicago. But one week in July 1995, the weather went haywire. Temperatures soared above body heat and stayed there for several days. The streets buckled. People turned up their air conditioning so high that power networks failed. Elevators stopped, leaving the frail stranded in high-rise ovens. In poorer areas, kids opened the fire hydrants 鈥� and the water system failed. In airless apartments across the city, old people began to die. More than 700 perished in the city as a direct result of the heatwave that week.
It was one of the greatest urban climatic disasters since the great London smog of 1952. And it bore striking similarities. As in London, no one noticed the human catastrophe developing in their midst. Until the bodies started piling up at the morgue, that is. And even then, the myth grew that the link between the deaths and the catastrophe had somehow been fabricated, or that the victims 鈥渉ad been about to die anyway鈥�.
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Eric Klinenberg, a young sociologist from Chicago, read about the heatwave while in Europe. He wondered why Chicagoans had proved so vulnerable, when the heatwaves of continental Europe are just as hot but kill fewer people. And why, months afterwards, did the bodies and possessions of almost 200 victims remained unclaimed? Heat Wave is the result. It鈥檚 a splendid book.
The official inquiry centred on the meteorological and medical aspects. But Klinenberg argues that it was above all a social disaster. In the US, more people die in heatwaves than in hurricanes, floods or any other meteorological event. But the deaths 鈥� 鈥渁lone, behind locked doors and sealed windows鈥� 鈥� mostly go unnoticed.
The typical victim in Chicago was old, male, and living alone. A disproportionate number were black. And behind the statistics are the human stories. Most poignant, perhaps, is the tale of a 68-year-old Hungarian 茅migr茅 found with a diary containing a daily record of the temperature going back for years. On 15 July 1995, it read 鈥�94 degrees鈥�. On 16 July, he was dead.