Those of us who lived in Chicago at that time recall the story unfolding very slowly. People die in a big city. More people die when it gets hot. Older people are more likely to die than younger. The victims of the heat wave died mostly alone; this was not a plane crash or a fire. Deaths in isolation take time to piece together. The notion of blame is very complicated. No city can keep all its citizens alive, although it's surely not unreasonable to hope that the city not contribute to the speed of their deaths.

In 2002, sociologist and writer Eric Klinenberg contextualized those events in a book, "Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago," recounting the various ways in which the city of Chicago failed its citizens during that scorching period. As Klinenberg analyzed that one July week, there were many factors in play. These included a wholesale lack of awareness of the danger of heat and the magnitude of the crisis that was unfolding, not to mention an absence of cooling centers, absurdly long emergency-response times, the blame games of city politics, poor public information and, perhaps most horrifying of all, the reluctance of some of the most at-risk persons to open their doors or windows.

Some Chicagoans feared the gang-fueled violence in the corridors of their public housing units, let alone on the streets outside. It was a fear that killed.

Source: Chris Jones, Critic, Chicago Tribune