HEALTH
A City of Extremes
How two public health crises twenty-five years apart show what’s changed and what hasn’t in Chicago’s health equity landscape BY ELORA APANTAKU AND CHARMAINE RUNES
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n Wednesday, July 12, 1995, Chicago sweltered. A heat wave rolled in and clung to the city for five days. Roads cracked open and bridges were hosed down to prevent them from locking in place under the sun. And even though infrastructure faltered, the city waited four days to declare a heat emergency, delaying the mobilization of additional workers in the fire and police departments to check on elderly citizens and get more ambulances on the roads. Mayor Richard M. Daley, staying as cool as possible and alluding to the city's ability to manage hazardous weather events, said during a news briefing: “It’s hot. It’s very hot…. We go to extremes in Chicago. And that’s why people like Chicago. We go to extremes.” The decision to not treat this natural disaster seriously would cost the lives of hundreds of Chicagoans. Now, twenty-five years later, Chicago faces another extreme public health crisis: the COVID-19 pandemic. And like the heat wave of 1995, COVID-19 disproportionately impacts older Black and brown Chicagoans, leaving residents and officials questioning the policies that have divided the city and weakened communities of color, all the while wondering what can be done to repair the decades-long inequity in Chicago’s public health infrastructure.
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ack in 1995, 105 degree Fahrenheit days seemed like business as usual in a city known for its hot summers. But the city’s citizens began to suffer in the second week of July as the heat index reached 125 degrees F, coupled with high humidity. Thousands of fire hydrants were opened up across town as people tried to cool off, and the demand for air conditioning overloaded a strained electricity grid, hurling tens of thousands of residences into blackouts. Calls to 911 for medical assistance skyrocketed above daily 22 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
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norms, and emergency departments became so overwhelmed that at one point, twentythree different hospitals, mostly on the South and Southwest Sides, stopped taking new patients from ambulances. By that weekend, the city had hired refrigerated trucks to sit outside the chief medical examiner's office to hold the additional bodies that could not fit in the city morgue, which only had room for 200 occupants. Bridget Vaughn, a lifelong South Sider who was in her thirties during the heat wave, recounts: “The scary part of the heat wave was to every day listen to all the numbers of people dying. It was like the city really didn't have a plan.” (Vaughn has been a South Side Weekly contributor over the years.) The final toll was 739 lives lost, dead from heat exhaustion and complications resulting from the heat wave. Those who died were mostly older and poorer Chicagoans, and Black Chicagoans were disproportionately affected. The Mayor’s Commission, tasked with determining what had led to so many deaths, declared the event “a unique meteorological event.” But some people disagree with this assessment. Eric Klinenberg, a social scientist born and raised in Chicago but currently at New York University, wrote in his 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago: “Hundreds of Chicago residents died alone, behind locked doors and sealed windows, out of contact with friends, family, and neighbors, unassisted by public agencies or community groups. There’s nothing natural about that.”
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n the aftermath of the heat wave, Chicago invested in policies, community education, and cooling centers designed to limit future heat-related deaths—but did nothing to change what had caused some neighborhoods to be overwhelmed by the emergency, such as weakened transportation systems, rising utility costs,
shuttered hospitals, and failing commercial districts. When another heat wave hit the city in 1999, only 103 people died and it was celebrated as a victory of Chicago’s “Extreme Weather Operations Plan.” But the same demographic was hit: older Black Chicagoans living alone in apartments. Many who died were living in apartments with air conditioning units that had gone unrepaired or were no longer functioning because of power outages. In 1999, Klinenberg published an academic paper on the heat wave, in which he wrote that “Chicago has at least learned how to handle the heat during isolated emergencies, and it is unlikely that another heat wave will prove so disastrous for the city again. Will something else?”
The COVID-19 pandemic is that something else, once again bringing to light the devastation that can occur at the intersection of public health emergencies and structural racism. As of July 10, the total number of COVID deaths in Chicago has surpassed 2,600, with eighty-one percent of these deaths occurring among people of color. On April 20, 2020, the Mayor’s office deployed the “Racial Equity Rapid Response Team” to attempt to lessen the burden of COVID-19 in three communities of color on the South and West Sides where cases were concentrated. At that time, there had been 683 COVID-related deaths in Chicago, eighty-four percent of whom were people of color.
