Global ChangeIntersection of Nature and Culture

Chicago 1995: How social disparities lead to environmental disasters

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

As I mentioned in the last post, heat waves have the potential to harm or kill a lot of people.  Who are the people most likely to suffer first? The experiences from the Chicago 1995 heat wave offer some insights for urban America.  Eric Klinenberg’s 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago is as relevant as ever to the current conversation about climate change.

Some excerpts from a U. Chicago Press interview with Klinenberg.

The heat made the city’s roads buckle. Train rails warped, causing long commuter and freight delays. City workers watered bridges to prevent them from locking when the plates expanded. Children riding in school buses became so dehydrated and nauseous that they had to be hosed down by the Fire Department. Hundreds of young people were hospitalized with heat-related illnesses. But the elderly, and especially the elderly who lived alone, were most vulnerable to the heat wave.

“It’s hot,” the mayor told the media. “But let’s not blow it out of proportion. . . . Every day people die of natural causes. You cannot claim that everybody who has died in the last eight or nine days dies of heat. Then everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat.” Many local journalists shared Daley’s skepticism, and before long the city was mired in a callous debate over whether the so-called heat deaths were—to use the term that recurred at the time—”really real.”

[T]he black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1.

Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths…Chicago’s Latinos tend to live in neighborhoods with high population density, busy commercial life in the streets, and vibrant public spaces. Most of the African American neighborhoods with high heat wave death rates had been abandoned—by employers, stores, and residents—in recent decades. The social ecology of abandonment, dispersion, and decay makes systems of social support exceedingly difficult to sustain.

The heat wave was a particle accelerator for the city:  It sped up and made visible the hazardous social conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Yes, the weather was extreme. But the deep sources of the tragedy were the everyday disasters that the city tolerates, takes for granted, or has officially forgotten.

Related Post: Say so long to your furnace and hello to a new air conditioner

photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/paraflyer/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Posted in: climate adaptation, environmental justice, race and class, social science, urban | 3 Comments »

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