“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.”
By July 13, the heat had been lingering in the 90s — hot, but not unforeseen at the height of Chicago summer — before peaking at 106 degrees that day. Despite the oppressive heat, some tried to shrug off the intensity: A college student told a local newspaper reporter the heat was typical for his native Singapore; Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley described it as another of the city’s extremes, a counterbalance to the frigid winters he suggested were more dangerous than heat. The Chicago Cubs kept their regular schedule, playing the Cincinnati Reds before tens of thousands of fans at Wrigley Field all week.
But signs that the city was rolling slow motion into a disaster were emerging among the city’s first responders.
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 Chicago Magazine in a 20th-anniversary oral history of the crisis. “The worst case was a construction worker. He had been working on a hot tar roof. He had a temperature of 111 and was in a coma when he came in.”
Klinenberg said the heat index, or “how the typical person experiences the heat,” went up to 126 degrees.
“Cities are heat islands,” Klinenberg said, because their pavement and steel attract the heat and trap it in. “Not only is the city hotter than outlying areas during the day, it stays hotter at night and doesn’t cool off.”
In the tropical-like heat with air conditioners selling out at stores and then running full blast in homes, power company ComEd couldn’t keep up with demand. Hundreds of thousands of residents lost power, sometimes for 48-hour stretches, Klinenberg said.
“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.”