Heat Wave

(At least, that’s what 45f feels like when it’s been below freezing for a long, long time!)

One of my guilty pleasures in life is watching the Weather Channel, especially their “When Weather Changed History” series. Last night’s episode was about the 1995 Chicago heat wave that killed an estimated 739 people. I was particularly interested in the focus on the public policy aspects of the disaster – what officials had done to prepare, what lessons they learned from it, etc. When Europe experienced an even longer heat episode several years later, French officials turned to Chicago for help. A number of articles have been published about this event; I am going to look for the study mentioned in the show, which compared two adjacent neighborhoods. One neighborhood had a much higher death rate than the other, and the study’s authors probed why. For assistance in finding other research relating to this event, email me.

An interview with Eric Klinenberg, the author of the book that details the history of the event, can be found here.