CHICAGO (WGN) – This week marks the 30th anniversary of the devastating Chicago Heat Wave of 1995.
Over 700 people died in the oppressive heat that year.
WGN-TV’s Mike Lowe spoke with former WGN-TV Meteorologist Tom Skilling on Tuesday. Skilling, who saw all of the tornadoes, floods and blizzards in the last 45 years, called the 1995 heat wave a weather event he’ll never forget.
The heat wave revealed a city vulnerable to heat and the event forever changed the way we deal with extreme weather.
When the morning sun arrived on Thursday, July 13, 1995, it marked the dawning of one of the worst natural and social disasters in modern U.S. history.
The heat wave of 1995 lasted five torturous days. The catastrophe claimed 739 lives, more than twice as many as the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
“That disaster in 1995 is the city’s most deadly natural disaster,” Skilling recalled.
Skilling was among the nation’s foremost weather experts. He had predicted heat, but did not foresee the horror.
“We saw heat coming. It was so extreme that it even exceeded what our computer models were forecasting, but we corrected for the heat and accurately predicted the high, which was 105 degrees at Midway Airport, with a low 80-degree dew point. That’s an incredible amount of moisture in the air,” Skilling said.
On the first day of the heat wave, the temperature soared to 106 degrees, but the humidity made it feel like 124 degrees.
“We had no understanding in that era, the point at which people started succumbing to this heat. When people started complaining about the heat, the standard response was, ‘Hey, it’s summer. It gets hot around here. Deal with it,'” Skilling said.
For five torturous days, the oppressive heat cloaked Chicago in high-90 and low-100-degree temperatures.
“When you have humidity with heat, it shuts down the human body’s ability to cool itself through the evaporation of perspiration on us,” Skilling explained.
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The emergency exposed a city of haves and have nots. Those with air conditioning were largely fine. Those who only had open windows and box fans were simply blowing the hot air at themselves with more force.
“You know, the construction of our buildings in Chicago makes them almost like ovens,” Skilling said. “So many people died and they were unidentified. They were there by themselves and there was no one to identify them, so there were mass graves that were dug.”
The demand for electricity stressed the grid; 49,000 homes lost power. Some also lost water pressure when fire hydrants were opened.
Paramedics were also overwhelmed, having to attend to hundreds and hundreds of emergency calls. Nearly two dozen hospitals treated so many patients that they closed their emergency rooms, forcing ambulances to bypass them.
“They call me at home and said, ‘Have you heard what’s going on here?’ I said no and they said, ‘Oh my word. The bodies at the coroner’s office are piling up to the extent they’ve had to call in refrigerator trucks to handle all of them.’ That was the first inkling of what was developing and that was catastrophic loss of life resulting from the heat,” Skilling said.
The most gruesome location was the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. By the third day of the heat wave, the morgue’s 220-bed capacity was exceeded by hundreds of bodies and authorities brought a fleet of refrigerated trucks to store the dead.
Chicago learned hard lessons about nature’s deadliest weather event.
“We learned a great deal through that tragedy and today the city of Chicago is very proactive when heat is coming in. They’re alerted by the Weather Service when it’s coming. The city opens cooling centers and will transport the elderly and vulnerable members of our population to these cooling centers, and we in the media are encouraged to remind folks to look in on the elderly,” Skilling said.
On Tuesday, Mayor Brandon Johnson attended an event to remember the 30th anniversary of the heat wave and how it shaped disaster preparedness.
