July 1, 2022 • 38 mins
July 1995: A deadly heatwave gripped Chicago - bridges buckled; the power grids failed; and the morgue ran out of space - but some neighbourhoods saw more deaths than others.
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg wanted to know why. So he headed to the hardest hit districts and found that social isolation and loneliness played an unsettling role in their heavy deaths tolls.
Does the Chicago heatwave teach us that in dealing with climate change we need to consider not just physical infrastructure, but social infrastructure too?
Eric Klinenberg's classic text on the topic is called Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago. For a full list of other sources go to timharford.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin, pushkin. Hello everyone, just popping up before we start
to note the debt this episode os to Eric Clindenberg's
(00:36):
book Heatwave, which you'll here cited several times. It's the
definitive account of the disaster we describe, and I couldn't
have written this episode without it. Clindenberg helped reframe what
a natural disaster actually is, and I've drawn extensively on
his reporting and his thesis. A revised edition of heat
Wave was published just a few years ago. I suggest
(00:57):
that you pick up a copy. One hundred and nine degrees.
So much for the morning job. Be careful out there, folk.
At half past three on a Wednesday day afternoon, the
twelfth of July nineteen ninety five, Chicago's branch of the
National Weather Service issued an advisory it was going to
(01:18):
get hot. He could be found from no kidding, It's
Chicago in July at As a local TV weatherman put it,
we saw the heat coming for some time, but you
were almost ridiculed when you'd say, hey, it's really going
to get hot. But it was really going to get hot.
(01:41):
The temperature had already hit ninety seven degrees. The next day,
the Thursday, was worse. At Midway Airport, it was one
hundred and six degrees and it was humid, like being
wrapped in hot towns. It felt like one hundred and
twenty five degrees. To have a temperature of one hundred
(02:02):
and four and a jew point in the low eighties
and not pop a thunderstorm was pretty extraordinary, said the weatherman.
A thunderstom's function in nature is to be the air conditioner.
Nature's air conditioners weren't working that week. There was no thunderstorm,
nor was there a cooling breeze from Lake Michigan to
the north and east. Instead, hot wet air was slowly
(02:27):
oozing over Chicago from the southwest. Stores sold out of
air conditioners. This is the kind of whether we pray for,
said one appliance manufacturer. The lucky folk who did have
air conditioners turned them up to the max. Those who
didn't went to the beach or a municipal pool. People
(02:48):
took boat trips out onto the lake, trips which were
abandoned because passengers were becoming dehydrated and ill. As neighborhood
streets baked like ovens. Some people set up sprinklers, others
illegally opened fire hydrants to provide a little relief and
a little joy less joyfully pelted work with rocks and
(03:09):
bricks when they tried to shut them off. The pressure
in Chicago's water mains starting to fall. The next day,
Friday was still over a hundred degrees and the stress
on the city was growing. Cars were breaking down roads buckling.
City crews were hosing down lifting bridges across the Chicago
(03:32):
River to prevent them jamming as the metal expanded. But
the Mayor, Richard Daily, tried to reassure people, let's not
blow it out of proportion. He said, it's very, very,
very hot. But then he added it was just one
of those crazy weather days like a winter blizzard. Yes,
(03:52):
we go to extremes in Chicago, and that's why people
love Chicago. We go to extremes. But it wasn't like
a winter blizzard, which Chicago could fix by sending out
the snow plows. The heat wave was subtler, more surprising,
more deadly. Even for a city of extremes, there are
(04:13):
limits to what can be endured. The heat wave was
about to push Chicago through those limits. I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to cautionary tales on Friday afternoon. It
(04:51):
was hot everywhere, but few places were hotter than the
inside of Transmission Substation one one four on Addison Street
in northwest Chicago. TSS one one four was a set
of large transformers twenty feet high fifteen feet across, which
stepped high voltage electricity down to domestic voltages. TSS one
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one four was hot because the transformers were operating well
above their design capacity, which means they were throwing off heat.
The temperature outside was well over a hundred degrees. The
temperature inside the substation didn't bear thinking about. At four
fifty six PM, a safety device overheated and shut down
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one of a set of four transformers. The other three
began to work even harder. At five forty seven PM,
a different safety device simply caught fire. At a second
transformer fails. The third and fourth transformers didn't last long.
Forty nine thousand customers lost electricity the next twenty four hours,
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and TSS one one four was merely the most serious
of more than thirteen hundred electrical equipment failures during the
heat wave. The power loss took out the air conditioning,
of course, but it also took out the elevators in
high rises, often the hottest buildings, and often a place
where elderly people would live, and it took out the
(06:23):
lights both inside and outside. The whole area was dark,
recalled the TV Weatherman. People were walking around with flashlights.
I've driven down Addison Street for I don't know how
many decades, I didn't recognize it. On Friday evening, as
utility workers scrambled in vain to stop the lights going out,
(06:45):
Edmund Donahue, the chief medical examiner for the Chicago area,
Cook County, received a phone call from his office, Doctor Donahue,
we just wanted to inform you that there are forty
autopsy cases on the list for tomorrow. Forty cases. I
can't never remember forty cases. Why. I think they're dying
(07:06):
of the heat. When Donahue arrived at the Morgue the
next morning, there were a hundred, and the bodies kept coming.
Late that morning, city health officials declared a heat emergency.
Every ambulance and every paramedic in the city was called
into work. It wasn't enough. At hospitals across the city. Overwhelmed,
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emergency rooms began to turn people away. What gave the
Chicago heat wave. The potential to be so deadly was
the combination of heat and humidity. This is measured by
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something called a wet bulb thermometer. A wet bulb thermometer
is wrapped in damp cloth, which ordinarily would cool down
the thermometer a lot as the water evaporates, but in
humid conditions, the water evaporates slowly and the bulb isn't
cooled much. The human body is cooled by the evaporation
of sweat from the skin, so the wet bulb thermometer
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provides a direct measure of how well the body's cooling
system can work. At a wet bulb temperature of ninety
five degrees, sweating simply cannot cool your skin. Below ninety
five degrees, your body's core temperature rises, your liver fails,
your muscles and other organs quickly deteriorate. Such conditions will
(08:37):
kill pretty much anyone within hours. Even at a wet
bulb temperature of eighty degrees, sweating will barely keep your
core temperature stable if you're physically active. It hit eighty
five degrees during the heat wave. That was a serious
risk for any frail or elderly person who lacked air conditioning.
(09:00):
By Saturday evening, there were two hundred and sixty nine
bodies at the Cook County Morgue. That was more than
the morgue's rigerators could hold. What would they do with
the corpses? One of the secretaries at the morgue remembered
a role playing exercise they had once done, imagining mass
casualties as Chicago was hit by a nerve gas attack. Well,
(09:24):
they didn't have the nerve gas, but they did have
the mass casualties. During that exercise, someone had said he'd
be able to provide refrigerated trucks if the morgue's cold
storage was overwhelmed. The secretary found that guy's number and
made the call. Before long, a couple of refrigerated trucks
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rolled up in the parking lot, courtesy of a local
meatpacking firm. It was a bad look, but what choice
did they have. Exhausted staff began to carry the bodies
through the baking heat of the parking lot and out
into the cold meat trucks, but the dead was still
coming in, carried by ambulances and police cars. Ed Donohue's
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team realized they were going to need more of those trucks.
Mayor Daily had said that people love Chicago because we
go to extremes. Now, Chicago's hospitals were being tested to
the extreme. So was the water system drained of pressure
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by the sprinklers and the hydrants. So was its electricity
supply pressed beyond the limit. As every air conditioning unit
in the city was cranked up. Pauline Jankovitz was being
tested to the extreme too. Pauline's malfunctioning air conditioner wasn't
much use, and her apartment was turning into a sauna.
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She wasn't too tempted to go outside. However, Pauline's neighborhood
scared her. Chicago is just a shooting gallery, she said.
I'm a moving target because I walked so slowly. Pauline
lived up on the third floor by choice. If I
were on the first floor, I'd be even more vulnerable
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to a break in. Pauline, who was in her eighties,
suffered from both a weak bladder and a weak leg.
Straying far from the toilet felt risky and embarrassing. She
had to walk with a crutch, and, as she said,
she couldn't move fast. The simple act of getting down
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several flights of stairs to street level and then back
up again was an ordeal. She didn't do it often,
but Pauline wasn't completely isolated. She had friends she could
call any time she wanted to talk. As the temperature rose,
Pauline spoke to one of those friends, who urged her
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to get out of the steam room atmosphere of her
apartment if it got too hot. On what proved to
be the hottest day of the year, Pauline resolved to
do just what her friend had said. She rose early
and slowly quietly limped down the stairs. The sheer effort
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was exhausting. She was tempted to turn around and head
back to the apartment, but she gathered herself and stepped
out onto the street. She waited for a city bus,
which took her to a local store. It was an oasis,
fully air conditioned. Pauline took her time, leaning against her
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shopping cart. Revitalized by the cool air, she bought some cherries,
her favorite treat. Then, having built her strength, she slowly
walked back to the bus stop, then rode the bus
till she got back to her apartment building. It was
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almost impossible to get back up the stairs her age,
her weak leg, and above all, the heat made those
few flights an almost insuperable obstacle. Back in the steaming apartment,
there was no escape from the heat. Sweat beaded on
her skin but did not evaporate. The air conditioning unit
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sputtered ineffectually. Pauline called her friend again. She was getting dizzy.
She said she could see her hands were swelling up,
it felt numb, and that sensation was spreading. Her friend
kept talking to her. Then Pauline said, I'm just going
to dunk my head in some water, maybe get some
(13:45):
wet towels. Just stay on the line for me. Pauline's
friend waited and listened down the phone line. She could
hear the water running. Then she could hear Pauline shuffling
slowly around the apartment. Was that the were of a fan.
She waited and waited. The fan kept whirring, but there
(14:13):
was no longer any sound from Paulean. Cautionary tales will
return after the break. As the bodies began to pile
(14:36):
up at the Cook County morgue, the Chief Medical Examiner,
Edmund Donohue, started to raise the alarm. The heat wave
was much more than an inconvenience. It was killing people,
hundreds of people with ambulances, overwhelmed hospitals, turning people away,
and the elderly far more vulnerable than the young. It
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was an eerie glimpse of more recent health crises, and so,
of course, the political heat was rising too. Politicians complained
that and medics such as Edmund Donohue wrongly attributed natural
deaths to the heat wave. They were playing politics and
exaggerating the crisis. Mayor Daily protested, you cannot claim that
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everybody who's died in the last eight or nine days
dies of heat, then everybody in the summer that dies
will die of heat. But Donahue wasn't claiming that everyone
who showed up at the Cook County Morgue had died
of heat, just that a large number of them had. Otherwise,
why had the death rate spiked so dramatically? Why were
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there now nine, count them, nine huge meat trucks lined
up in the morgue's parking lot, each full of bodies.
And despite the haunting sight of those trucks, there were
also grumbles that the whole thing was a media concoction.
Did people die of the heat or just in the heat,
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and some commentators observed that those who had died, generally
elderly and also often black and poor, would have died
soon anyway. The near legendary local columnist Mike Royko wrote
a piece titled Killer heat Wave or a Media Event.
Royko argued that Chicago had always had heat waves. What
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was special about this one? He wrote, When poor Gramps
croaked in those days, nobody got to see him being
wheeled into the morgue on the ten o'clock news. He added,
old people inevitably die of one thing or another. For
some of them, the weather just speeds up the process.
In other words, it's perfectly natural for old people to die,
(16:52):
and the media were making a fuss about nothing. Sound familiar.
And yet, while Royko's argument has the ring of plausibility
about it, he's tended the truth on its head, hasn't he?
The media yawn at heat waves. They're much more interested
in tornadoes or volcanoes or terrorist attacks, something that looks
(17:15):
good on film. Just imagine that a plane had crashed
at O'Hare Airport, killing a couple of hundred people. It
would have been a huge news event. The reporters and
the cameras would have rushed to the scene immediately. Veterans
at the Cook County Morgue didn't need to imagine that scenario.
(17:35):
They could remember it. Sixteen years earlier, a passenger jet
had crashed at O'Hare and two hundred and seventy three
people had died. To the morgue workers, the situation they
faced in the heat wave wasn't much different. Two hundred
and seventy three victims of the plane crash, two hundred
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and sixty nine corpses at the morgue by Saturday night,
and for the Cook County Morgue, things got worse because
people kept coming in for day after day after day.
Eventually the heat would kill nearly three times as many
people as the plane crash. It was as though an
airliner had crashed on the Friday. The morgue workers and
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the emergency services had worked heroically for twenty four hours,
and then the call came in there's been another crash.
Expect another two or three hundred casualties, And a day
or so later, he won't believe it, but there's been
a third catastrophe at O'Hare, a triple plane crash with
more than seven hundred fatalities would have been almost unthinkable.
(18:43):
Can you imagine the headlines. Eventually, journalists started to catch
onto the heatquak, and TV helicopters flew over the Cook
County Morgue's parking lot, capturing that ghoulish footage of the
line of refrigerated trucks. But other disasters of the same
era received far more coverage. For example, the Lomer Preator earthquake,
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which in nineteen eighty nine killed sixty nine people in
San Francisco and Oakland. Sixty nine deaths is a disaster,
of course, but the eventual death toll in Chicago was
seven hundred and thirty nine. After trying to blame doctor Donohue,
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city authorities tried a different tack, blame the victims. The problem,
said one city official, was that people didn't look after
themselves and didn't accept help. We did everything possible, he said,
but some people didn't want to open their doors to us.
That was a clever attempt to imply that city workers
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were knocking on the door of every vulnerable person. They weren't.
Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
later concluded that the city government didn't deploy enough street
level workers. Still, the victim blaming excuse touches on an
important truth. A lot of people didn't want to open
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their doors, whether to city workers or to their neighbors.
One survivor, an elderly resident named Bob Greblow, explained, if
someone comes to the door, I won't open it. I'll
talk through the door because you never know. You never know.
At the Friday peak of the heat wave, the local
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news channel had led its evening broadcast with a warning
not of the deadly heat, but that opening your window
might allow thieves to break into your apartment. Bob wouldn't
go out either. That was risking both himself and the
apartment he left behind. Young people are on the streets.
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When I go to the currency exchange to get my check,
there's robberies every day. It's too dangerous out there, even
during the day. That's when they get you. You know,
when you go get your money. It's scary, but you've
got to do it. What else are you going to do? Anyway?
I don't bother other people, and I don't want to
be bothered by other people. That's just my way. I've
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nowhere that I want to go easy for city officials
to complain that people wouldn't open their doors, but people
like Bob had good reason to fear the outside world.
As the great urban observer Jane Jacobs told the Chicago
Sometimes back then, it took a lot of effort to
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make people this isolated. Of course, not everyone was isolated.
Chicago's are buzzing city here a long time residence, singing
its praises. People stay here because they like walking to
the stores. They can get their food here, they can
go to the bakery. Kids are out, old people are out,
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people are shopping. There's really no need to get in
the car and go anywhere. You can certainly do things
within walking distance, and people do this. Bustling city was
full of air conditioned spaces, many of them, such as
libraries and shops, open to anyone free of charge. They
could and did make space for the frail and the
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elderly to take shelter from the heat. So why didn't
vulnerable people just stroll to the local store and hang
out there where it was cool. Bob Greblow could tell you,
it's too dangerous out there. I've nowhere that I want
to go. In the years after the heatwave, a young
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sociologist named Eric Klinenberg spent time with vulnerable people in
Chicago communities, examine the statistics on the death toll, and
interviewed people with a wide variety of perspectives. His book,
Heat Wave is the definitive account of what went wrong
under the surface of the catastrophe. The most striking thing
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Kennenberg did was to contrast two adjacent Chicago neighborhoods, South
Lawndale and North Lawndale. On paper, both neighborhoods had looked vulnerable,
with lots of impoverished elderly people living alone. Both were
mostly non white, another possible indicator of vulnerability, and yet
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North Lawndale had a heat wave death rate ten times
higher than South Lawndale. We go to extremes, the mayor
had said, And this difference truly was extreme. So why
had South Lawndale, so similar on paper, been largely spared
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when North Lawndale had suffered so badly. But talking to
local people about their lives, the explanation was clear. North Lawndale,
where Bob Greblo lived, depopulated. It was an urban desert
pockmarked with vacant lots. Gangs used it as a convenient
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place to sell drugs. One resident had remembered his neighbors
hanging out on sweltering nights in the nineteen fifties. We
used to sit outside all night and just talk, but
that wasn't possible in nineteen ninety five, not with bullets flying.
Big employers such as International Harvester, Sears, Roebuck, and Western
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Electric had moved away, and shops had closed. The Streets
of North Lawndale felt deserted. Elderly people were afraid of
being robbed when they went out, and afraid that their
homes would be ransacked in their absence. They weren't used
to walking to local shops, and there weren't many local
shops to walk to. South Lawndale was equally poor, but
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it was overcrowded rather than deserted. As a result, it
felt bustling and safe. You could step outside your door
anytime and there would be folk around. Those happy Chicago
residents we heard from a couple of minutes ago walking
around visiting the bakery they lived in South Lawndale. South
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Lawndale resident Frank Krook spent his whole life there. I'm
not afraid in my neighborhood said Frank, we walk in
the streets in the middle of the night when we
come home. He sounds so different to Bob or Pauline,
doesn't he. When the heat wave struck, of course, Frank
and the other old timers were happy to walk into
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an air conditioned store nearby and hang out. They felt
safe leaving an empty apartment behind. When at home, they
felt safe opening their doors to the people who came
to check on them in a heat wave. Lively streets
save lives. When the Great Jane Jacobs summarized Eric Klinenbergh's findings,
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she highlighted something so mundane that it's easy to overlook.
In each neighborhood. When the crisis struck, people kept behaving
as they had before. North Lawndale didn't have a functioning community.
South Lawndale did when the crisis came. That meant that
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ten times as many people died in desolate North Lawndale
than they did in the bustling neighborhood to the south.
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. Recovering the bodies
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was a horrific job. One of the hundreds of victims
was found when the police got his door open on
the nineteenth of July, a week after the first heat
warnings mail age. Seventy nine Black victim did not respond
to phone calls or knocks on victim's door since Sunday,
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sixteenth July ninety five. Victim was known as quiet to
himself and at times not to answer the door. What
was that seventy nine year old thinking before he passed
out in the heat. Did he think of the outside
world like Bob Greblo did, If some one comes to
(27:43):
the door, I won't open it. I'll talk through the
door because you never know. Did he fondly remember the
nineteen fifties when people could hang out with their neighbors.
We used to sit outside all night and just talk.
We can only guess, like many of the seven hundred
and thirty nine people who died, he was voiceless and alone.
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The police report continues, landlord does not have any information
to any relatives to victim. Chain was on door. Responding
officer was able to see victim on sofa, with flies
on victim and a very strong odor of decay and decomposing.
Responding officer cut chain per permission of landlord, called medical examiner,
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who authorized removal. No known relatives at this time. Remember
what Jane Jacobs had said, It took a lot of
effort to make people this isolated. As the heat wave hit,
it was easy to see the physical infrastructure failing, the
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power cuts, the cracking roads, the trickling water mains, and
the buckling bridges. But the physical infrastructure was straining all
over the city. It doesn't explain the difference between people
like the nameless seventy nine year old far from neighborhood stores,
too frightened to open the door, and people such as
Frank Krook, who had neighbors checking in on them and
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who thought nothing of strolling out to cool down in
a local grocery store. Remember that the death rate in
North Lawndale was ten times as high as the death
rate in South Lawndale. The North Thorndale residents who died
weren't killed by a failure of physical infrastructure around them,
but by a failure of the social infrastructure. That's much
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harder to see, to measure, or to fix. But the
failure was all around them, constraining every single day of
their lives. Heat continues to be a killer. The World
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Health Organization estimates that between nineteen ninety eight and twenty seventeen,
one hundred and sixty six thousand people died owing to
heat waves, yet they rarely get the attention that we
would devote to a volcano, a tsunami, or a wildfire.
And because the global climate is changing, extreme heat waves
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are becoming much more common. Events that we might expect
once in fifty thousand years we might now see every
decade or so. So we're going to have to get
used to scorching temperatures and smothering humidity, and that makes
it all the more important to understand what happened in
Chicago a quarter of a century ago. We can't prevent
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heat waves, but there's a lot we can do to
make them less dangerous. The physical shape of neighborhoods can
make them heat wave prone or heat wave resistant. A
city block with tarmac and concrete, little shade and rapid
drainage of water can be several degrees hotter than one
with a shade of trees or patches of vegetation that
(31:08):
catch water and let it evaporate. Leafy neighborhoods tend to
be a great deal cooler, and it will surprise nobody
to hear that leafy neighborhoods also tend to be richer.
A recent study in the journal Climate found that historically
red lined areas in US cities are an average of
(31:28):
four point five degrees fahrenheit warmer. These areas are mostly
African American, denied federal mortgage support in the nineteen thirties
and long marginalized afterwards. North Lawndale is one of them.
But while this is all so depressing, doesn't it also
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offer some hope. When we think about adapting to climate change,
we often think of expensive defenses, such as dikes and
flood barriers, or waterproofing power and transport infrastructure so that
it copes better with extreme conditions. For some places, that's
a cost we're going to have to swallow. But the
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experience of Chicago suggests that there's another kind of adaptation,
another kind of weatherproofing, supporting vibrant neighborhoods, planting trees and
laying out parks, reducing crime and encouraging local businesses, funding
libraries and community centers. I'm not saying it's easy to
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turn a failing neighborhood into a thriving one, but I
am saying that it's the kind of thing we'd want
to do anyway. The flourishing community of South Lawndale protected
its vulnerable residence in a way that the threadbare community
of North Lawndale just couldn't. But that wasn't some expensive
(32:52):
precaution that paid off only in a crisis. It was
a natural consequence of the way South Lawndale worked every
hour of every day, making it a far happier, healthier,
safer place to live. Paul Jankovitz remember, was isolated and afraid,
(33:13):
but she had a friend she could call. When we
left Pauline, she had gone quiet. Her friend was on
the other end of the telephone, waiting, increasingly anxious. At last,
Pauline came back on the line. She was okay. Pauline
had been dipping her head in water, then brought wet
(33:33):
towels back to the bed. She turned on her fan
and lay down under the towels with a fan blowing
over her. She lost track of time a bit, then
remembered that her friend was still on the line. Thanks
for waiting for me. I feel a lot better now.
I'm going to keep using the towels and the fan
is working, And it was working Pauline hung up, lay
(33:56):
down again, and waited to regain her strength. Looking back,
she laughed about it. She told the sociologist Eric Klinnenberg.
I have a special way to beat the heat. I
like to go on a Caribbean cruise. I get several
washcloths and dip them in cold water, but I placed
them over my eyes so that I can't see. I
(34:17):
lie down and set the fan directly on me. The
wet towels and the wind from the fan give a
cool breeze, and I imagine myself on a cruise around
the islands, even in the humidity. The towels and the
fan help, but so do the friends. My friends though
about my cruises too, so when they call me on
(34:39):
hot days, they all say, Hi, Pauline, how was your trip?
We laugh about it, but it keeps me alive. But
what if the virtual cruise hadn't worked? What if Pauline
had passed out her friend was still on the line.
Should have called the ambulance, don't just knock on the door.
Should have said, break it down. I know she's in there.
(35:00):
I was talking to her when she stopped responding. Pauline
was vulnerable, and she was isolated, but she had someone
looking out for her, someone she could trust. Everybody should,
but in Chicago, not everybody did. The last forty one
(35:26):
victims of the Chicago heatwave were buried six weeks later
in a mass grave one hundred and sixty feet long.
They were so alone that even after death, nobody came
to claim them. Forty one simple pine boxes were laid
side by side and the six foot deep trench. Each
(35:47):
had a brass tag with a number. County investigators had
tried to track down the families of each victim for
them to arrange a funeral. Often they had succeeded. These
forty one were the ones who were left Edward Hoffmann,
Leonard Himer, Liza Kimberly, all As Yenchovich, Lydia Payne, Thomas Randall,
(36:13):
William Reidsville, Robert Yankovich, Ethel Young. Sometimes no family member
could be found, Sometimes the family didn't want to get involved.
A few people had shown up to bear witness during
the brief service. Some were solemn, some angry, some were
(36:38):
simply sobbing. If any of these living knew any of
the dead, they did not admit it. Eric Klinenbergh's book
(37:06):
is heat Wave. For a full list of our sources,
see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan
Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The
(37:30):
sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge,
Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg,
Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
(37:51):
Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano, Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want
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Cautionary Tale shorts. Then sign up for Pushkin Plus on
(38:14):
the show page and Apple podcast, or at Pushkin dot fm,
slash plus,
Pushkin, pushkin. Hello everyone, just popping up before we start
to note the debt this episode os to Eric Clindenberg's
(00:36):
book Heatwave, which you'll here cited several times. It's the
definitive account of the disaster we describe, and I couldn't
have written this episode without it. Clindenberg helped reframe what
a natural disaster actually is, and I've drawn extensively on
his reporting and his thesis. A revised edition of heat
Wave was published just a few years ago. I suggest
(00:57):
that you pick up a copy. One hundred and nine degrees.
So much for the morning job. Be careful out there, folk.
At half past three on a Wednesday day afternoon, the
twelfth of July nineteen ninety five, Chicago's branch of the
National Weather Service issued an advisory it was going to
(01:18):
get hot. He could be found from no kidding, It's
Chicago in July at As a local TV weatherman put it,
we saw the heat coming for some time, but you
were almost ridiculed when you'd say, hey, it's really going
to get hot. But it was really going to get hot.
(01:41):
The temperature had already hit ninety seven degrees. The next day,
the Thursday, was worse. At Midway Airport, it was one
hundred and six degrees and it was humid, like being
wrapped in hot towns. It felt like one hundred and
twenty five degrees. To have a temperature of one hundred
(02:02):
and four and a jew point in the low eighties
and not pop a thunderstorm was pretty extraordinary, said the weatherman.
A thunderstom's function in nature is to be the air conditioner.
Nature's air conditioners weren't working that week. There was no thunderstorm,
nor was there a cooling breeze from Lake Michigan to
the north and east. Instead, hot wet air was slowly
(02:27):
oozing over Chicago from the southwest. Stores sold out of
air conditioners. This is the kind of whether we pray for,
said one appliance manufacturer. The lucky folk who did have
air conditioners turned them up to the max. Those who
didn't went to the beach or a municipal pool. People
(02:48):
took boat trips out onto the lake, trips which were
abandoned because passengers were becoming dehydrated and ill. As neighborhood
streets baked like ovens. Some people set up sprinklers, others
illegally opened fire hydrants to provide a little relief and
a little joy less joyfully pelted work with rocks and
(03:09):
bricks when they tried to shut them off. The pressure
in Chicago's water mains starting to fall. The next day,
Friday was still over a hundred degrees and the stress
on the city was growing. Cars were breaking down roads buckling.
City crews were hosing down lifting bridges across the Chicago
(03:32):
River to prevent them jamming as the metal expanded. But
the Mayor, Richard Daily, tried to reassure people, let's not
blow it out of proportion. He said, it's very, very,
very hot. But then he added it was just one
of those crazy weather days like a winter blizzard. Yes,
(03:52):
we go to extremes in Chicago, and that's why people
love Chicago. We go to extremes. But it wasn't like
a winter blizzard, which Chicago could fix by sending out
the snow plows. The heat wave was subtler, more surprising,
more deadly. Even for a city of extremes, there are
(04:13):
limits to what can be endured. The heat wave was
about to push Chicago through those limits. I'm Tim Harford,
and you're listening to cautionary tales on Friday afternoon. It
(04:51):
was hot everywhere, but few places were hotter than the
inside of Transmission Substation one one four on Addison Street
in northwest Chicago. TSS one one four was a set
of large transformers twenty feet high fifteen feet across, which
stepped high voltage electricity down to domestic voltages. TSS one
(05:15):
one four was hot because the transformers were operating well
above their design capacity, which means they were throwing off heat.
The temperature outside was well over a hundred degrees. The
temperature inside the substation didn't bear thinking about. At four
fifty six PM, a safety device overheated and shut down
(05:37):
one of a set of four transformers. The other three
began to work even harder. At five forty seven PM,
a different safety device simply caught fire. At a second
transformer fails. The third and fourth transformers didn't last long.
Forty nine thousand customers lost electricity the next twenty four hours,
(06:01):
and TSS one one four was merely the most serious
of more than thirteen hundred electrical equipment failures during the
heat wave. The power loss took out the air conditioning,
of course, but it also took out the elevators in
high rises, often the hottest buildings, and often a place
where elderly people would live, and it took out the
(06:23):
lights both inside and outside. The whole area was dark,
recalled the TV Weatherman. People were walking around with flashlights.
I've driven down Addison Street for I don't know how
many decades, I didn't recognize it. On Friday evening, as
utility workers scrambled in vain to stop the lights going out,
(06:45):
Edmund Donahue, the chief medical examiner for the Chicago area,
Cook County, received a phone call from his office, Doctor Donahue,
we just wanted to inform you that there are forty
autopsy cases on the list for tomorrow. Forty cases. I
can't never remember forty cases. Why. I think they're dying
(07:06):
of the heat. When Donahue arrived at the Morgue the
next morning, there were a hundred, and the bodies kept coming.
Late that morning, city health officials declared a heat emergency.
Every ambulance and every paramedic in the city was called
into work. It wasn't enough. At hospitals across the city. Overwhelmed,
(07:31):
emergency rooms began to turn people away. What gave the
Chicago heat wave. The potential to be so deadly was
the combination of heat and humidity. This is measured by
(07:52):
something called a wet bulb thermometer. A wet bulb thermometer
is wrapped in damp cloth, which ordinarily would cool down
the thermometer a lot as the water evaporates, but in
humid conditions, the water evaporates slowly and the bulb isn't
cooled much. The human body is cooled by the evaporation
of sweat from the skin, so the wet bulb thermometer
(08:14):
provides a direct measure of how well the body's cooling
system can work. At a wet bulb temperature of ninety
five degrees, sweating simply cannot cool your skin. Below ninety
five degrees, your body's core temperature rises, your liver fails,
your muscles and other organs quickly deteriorate. Such conditions will
(08:37):
kill pretty much anyone within hours. Even at a wet
bulb temperature of eighty degrees, sweating will barely keep your
core temperature stable if you're physically active. It hit eighty
five degrees during the heat wave. That was a serious
risk for any frail or elderly person who lacked air conditioning.
(09:00):
By Saturday evening, there were two hundred and sixty nine
bodies at the Cook County Morgue. That was more than
the morgue's rigerators could hold. What would they do with
the corpses? One of the secretaries at the morgue remembered
a role playing exercise they had once done, imagining mass
casualties as Chicago was hit by a nerve gas attack. Well,
(09:24):
they didn't have the nerve gas, but they did have
the mass casualties. During that exercise, someone had said he'd
be able to provide refrigerated trucks if the morgue's cold
storage was overwhelmed. The secretary found that guy's number and
made the call. Before long, a couple of refrigerated trucks
(09:45):
rolled up in the parking lot, courtesy of a local
meatpacking firm. It was a bad look, but what choice
did they have. Exhausted staff began to carry the bodies
through the baking heat of the parking lot and out
into the cold meat trucks, but the dead was still
coming in, carried by ambulances and police cars. Ed Donohue's
(10:10):
team realized they were going to need more of those trucks.
Mayor Daily had said that people love Chicago because we
go to extremes. Now, Chicago's hospitals were being tested to
the extreme. So was the water system drained of pressure
(10:32):
by the sprinklers and the hydrants. So was its electricity
supply pressed beyond the limit. As every air conditioning unit
in the city was cranked up. Pauline Jankovitz was being
tested to the extreme too. Pauline's malfunctioning air conditioner wasn't
much use, and her apartment was turning into a sauna.
(10:54):
She wasn't too tempted to go outside. However, Pauline's neighborhood
scared her. Chicago is just a shooting gallery, she said.
I'm a moving target because I walked so slowly. Pauline
lived up on the third floor by choice. If I
were on the first floor, I'd be even more vulnerable
(11:15):
to a break in. Pauline, who was in her eighties,
suffered from both a weak bladder and a weak leg.
Straying far from the toilet felt risky and embarrassing. She
had to walk with a crutch, and, as she said,
she couldn't move fast. The simple act of getting down
(11:36):
several flights of stairs to street level and then back
up again was an ordeal. She didn't do it often,
but Pauline wasn't completely isolated. She had friends she could
call any time she wanted to talk. As the temperature rose,
Pauline spoke to one of those friends, who urged her
(11:56):
to get out of the steam room atmosphere of her
apartment if it got too hot. On what proved to
be the hottest day of the year, Pauline resolved to
do just what her friend had said. She rose early
and slowly quietly limped down the stairs. The sheer effort
(12:17):
was exhausting. She was tempted to turn around and head
back to the apartment, but she gathered herself and stepped
out onto the street. She waited for a city bus,
which took her to a local store. It was an oasis,
fully air conditioned. Pauline took her time, leaning against her
(12:39):
shopping cart. Revitalized by the cool air, she bought some cherries,
her favorite treat. Then, having built her strength, she slowly
walked back to the bus stop, then rode the bus
till she got back to her apartment building. It was
(13:00):
almost impossible to get back up the stairs her age,
her weak leg, and above all, the heat made those
few flights an almost insuperable obstacle. Back in the steaming apartment,
there was no escape from the heat. Sweat beaded on
her skin but did not evaporate. The air conditioning unit
(13:23):
sputtered ineffectually. Pauline called her friend again. She was getting dizzy.
She said she could see her hands were swelling up,
it felt numb, and that sensation was spreading. Her friend
kept talking to her. Then Pauline said, I'm just going
to dunk my head in some water, maybe get some
(13:45):
wet towels. Just stay on the line for me. Pauline's
friend waited and listened down the phone line. She could
hear the water running. Then she could hear Pauline shuffling
slowly around the apartment. Was that the were of a fan.
She waited and waited. The fan kept whirring, but there
(14:13):
was no longer any sound from Paulean. Cautionary tales will
return after the break. As the bodies began to pile
(14:36):
up at the Cook County morgue, the Chief Medical Examiner,
Edmund Donohue, started to raise the alarm. The heat wave
was much more than an inconvenience. It was killing people,
hundreds of people with ambulances, overwhelmed hospitals, turning people away,
and the elderly far more vulnerable than the young. It
(14:59):
was an eerie glimpse of more recent health crises, and so,
of course, the political heat was rising too. Politicians complained
that and medics such as Edmund Donohue wrongly attributed natural
deaths to the heat wave. They were playing politics and
exaggerating the crisis. Mayor Daily protested, you cannot claim that
(15:21):
everybody who's died in the last eight or nine days
dies of heat, then everybody in the summer that dies
will die of heat. But Donahue wasn't claiming that everyone
who showed up at the Cook County Morgue had died
of heat, just that a large number of them had. Otherwise,
why had the death rate spiked so dramatically? Why were
(15:44):
there now nine, count them, nine huge meat trucks lined
up in the morgue's parking lot, each full of bodies.
And despite the haunting sight of those trucks, there were
also grumbles that the whole thing was a media concoction.
Did people die of the heat or just in the heat,
(16:05):
and some commentators observed that those who had died, generally
elderly and also often black and poor, would have died
soon anyway. The near legendary local columnist Mike Royko wrote
a piece titled Killer heat Wave or a Media Event.
Royko argued that Chicago had always had heat waves. What
(16:28):
was special about this one? He wrote, When poor Gramps
croaked in those days, nobody got to see him being
wheeled into the morgue on the ten o'clock news. He added,
old people inevitably die of one thing or another. For
some of them, the weather just speeds up the process.
In other words, it's perfectly natural for old people to die,
(16:52):
and the media were making a fuss about nothing. Sound familiar.
And yet, while Royko's argument has the ring of plausibility
about it, he's tended the truth on its head, hasn't he?
The media yawn at heat waves. They're much more interested
in tornadoes or volcanoes or terrorist attacks, something that looks
(17:15):
good on film. Just imagine that a plane had crashed
at O'Hare Airport, killing a couple of hundred people. It
would have been a huge news event. The reporters and
the cameras would have rushed to the scene immediately. Veterans
at the Cook County Morgue didn't need to imagine that scenario.
(17:35):
They could remember it. Sixteen years earlier, a passenger jet
had crashed at O'Hare and two hundred and seventy three
people had died. To the morgue workers, the situation they
faced in the heat wave wasn't much different. Two hundred
and seventy three victims of the plane crash, two hundred
(17:55):
and sixty nine corpses at the morgue by Saturday night,
and for the Cook County Morgue, things got worse because
people kept coming in for day after day after day.
Eventually the heat would kill nearly three times as many
people as the plane crash. It was as though an
airliner had crashed on the Friday. The morgue workers and
(18:18):
the emergency services had worked heroically for twenty four hours,
and then the call came in there's been another crash.
Expect another two or three hundred casualties, And a day
or so later, he won't believe it, but there's been
a third catastrophe at O'Hare, a triple plane crash with
more than seven hundred fatalities would have been almost unthinkable.
(18:43):
Can you imagine the headlines. Eventually, journalists started to catch
onto the heatquak, and TV helicopters flew over the Cook
County Morgue's parking lot, capturing that ghoulish footage of the
line of refrigerated trucks. But other disasters of the same
era received far more coverage. For example, the Lomer Preator earthquake,
(19:08):
which in nineteen eighty nine killed sixty nine people in
San Francisco and Oakland. Sixty nine deaths is a disaster,
of course, but the eventual death toll in Chicago was
seven hundred and thirty nine. After trying to blame doctor Donohue,
(19:32):
city authorities tried a different tack, blame the victims. The problem,
said one city official, was that people didn't look after
themselves and didn't accept help. We did everything possible, he said,
but some people didn't want to open their doors to us.
That was a clever attempt to imply that city workers
(19:54):
were knocking on the door of every vulnerable person. They weren't.
Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
later concluded that the city government didn't deploy enough street
level workers. Still, the victim blaming excuse touches on an
important truth. A lot of people didn't want to open
(20:16):
their doors, whether to city workers or to their neighbors.
One survivor, an elderly resident named Bob Greblow, explained, if
someone comes to the door, I won't open it. I'll
talk through the door because you never know. You never know.
At the Friday peak of the heat wave, the local
(20:37):
news channel had led its evening broadcast with a warning
not of the deadly heat, but that opening your window
might allow thieves to break into your apartment. Bob wouldn't
go out either. That was risking both himself and the
apartment he left behind. Young people are on the streets.
(20:59):
When I go to the currency exchange to get my check,
there's robberies every day. It's too dangerous out there, even
during the day. That's when they get you. You know,
when you go get your money. It's scary, but you've
got to do it. What else are you going to do? Anyway?
I don't bother other people, and I don't want to
be bothered by other people. That's just my way. I've
(21:20):
nowhere that I want to go easy for city officials
to complain that people wouldn't open their doors, but people
like Bob had good reason to fear the outside world.
As the great urban observer Jane Jacobs told the Chicago
Sometimes back then, it took a lot of effort to
(21:41):
make people this isolated. Of course, not everyone was isolated.
Chicago's are buzzing city here a long time residence, singing
its praises. People stay here because they like walking to
the stores. They can get their food here, they can
go to the bakery. Kids are out, old people are out,
(22:03):
people are shopping. There's really no need to get in
the car and go anywhere. You can certainly do things
within walking distance, and people do this. Bustling city was
full of air conditioned spaces, many of them, such as
libraries and shops, open to anyone free of charge. They
could and did make space for the frail and the
(22:25):
elderly to take shelter from the heat. So why didn't
vulnerable people just stroll to the local store and hang
out there where it was cool. Bob Greblow could tell you,
it's too dangerous out there. I've nowhere that I want
to go. In the years after the heatwave, a young
(22:49):
sociologist named Eric Klinenberg spent time with vulnerable people in
Chicago communities, examine the statistics on the death toll, and
interviewed people with a wide variety of perspectives. His book,
Heat Wave is the definitive account of what went wrong
under the surface of the catastrophe. The most striking thing
(23:12):
Kennenberg did was to contrast two adjacent Chicago neighborhoods, South
Lawndale and North Lawndale. On paper, both neighborhoods had looked vulnerable,
with lots of impoverished elderly people living alone. Both were
mostly non white, another possible indicator of vulnerability, and yet
(23:35):
North Lawndale had a heat wave death rate ten times
higher than South Lawndale. We go to extremes, the mayor
had said, And this difference truly was extreme. So why
had South Lawndale, so similar on paper, been largely spared
(23:56):
when North Lawndale had suffered so badly. But talking to
local people about their lives, the explanation was clear. North Lawndale,
where Bob Greblo lived, depopulated. It was an urban desert
pockmarked with vacant lots. Gangs used it as a convenient
(24:16):
place to sell drugs. One resident had remembered his neighbors
hanging out on sweltering nights in the nineteen fifties. We
used to sit outside all night and just talk, but
that wasn't possible in nineteen ninety five, not with bullets flying.
Big employers such as International Harvester, Sears, Roebuck, and Western
(24:38):
Electric had moved away, and shops had closed. The Streets
of North Lawndale felt deserted. Elderly people were afraid of
being robbed when they went out, and afraid that their
homes would be ransacked in their absence. They weren't used
to walking to local shops, and there weren't many local
shops to walk to. South Lawndale was equally poor, but
(25:03):
it was overcrowded rather than deserted. As a result, it
felt bustling and safe. You could step outside your door
anytime and there would be folk around. Those happy Chicago
residents we heard from a couple of minutes ago walking
around visiting the bakery they lived in South Lawndale. South
(25:25):
Lawndale resident Frank Krook spent his whole life there. I'm
not afraid in my neighborhood said Frank, we walk in
the streets in the middle of the night when we
come home. He sounds so different to Bob or Pauline,
doesn't he. When the heat wave struck, of course, Frank
and the other old timers were happy to walk into
(25:45):
an air conditioned store nearby and hang out. They felt
safe leaving an empty apartment behind. When at home, they
felt safe opening their doors to the people who came
to check on them in a heat wave. Lively streets
save lives. When the Great Jane Jacobs summarized Eric Klinenbergh's findings,
(26:08):
she highlighted something so mundane that it's easy to overlook.
In each neighborhood. When the crisis struck, people kept behaving
as they had before. North Lawndale didn't have a functioning community.
South Lawndale did when the crisis came. That meant that
(26:30):
ten times as many people died in desolate North Lawndale
than they did in the bustling neighborhood to the south.
Cautionary tales will return in a moment. Recovering the bodies
(27:01):
was a horrific job. One of the hundreds of victims
was found when the police got his door open on
the nineteenth of July, a week after the first heat
warnings mail age. Seventy nine Black victim did not respond
to phone calls or knocks on victim's door since Sunday,
(27:23):
sixteenth July ninety five. Victim was known as quiet to
himself and at times not to answer the door. What
was that seventy nine year old thinking before he passed
out in the heat. Did he think of the outside
world like Bob Greblo did, If some one comes to
(27:43):
the door, I won't open it. I'll talk through the
door because you never know. Did he fondly remember the
nineteen fifties when people could hang out with their neighbors.
We used to sit outside all night and just talk.
We can only guess, like many of the seven hundred
and thirty nine people who died, he was voiceless and alone.
(28:09):
The police report continues, landlord does not have any information
to any relatives to victim. Chain was on door. Responding
officer was able to see victim on sofa, with flies
on victim and a very strong odor of decay and decomposing.
Responding officer cut chain per permission of landlord, called medical examiner,
(28:32):
who authorized removal. No known relatives at this time. Remember
what Jane Jacobs had said, It took a lot of
effort to make people this isolated. As the heat wave hit,
it was easy to see the physical infrastructure failing, the
(28:56):
power cuts, the cracking roads, the trickling water mains, and
the buckling bridges. But the physical infrastructure was straining all
over the city. It doesn't explain the difference between people
like the nameless seventy nine year old far from neighborhood stores,
too frightened to open the door, and people such as
Frank Krook, who had neighbors checking in on them and
(29:18):
who thought nothing of strolling out to cool down in
a local grocery store. Remember that the death rate in
North Lawndale was ten times as high as the death
rate in South Lawndale. The North Thorndale residents who died
weren't killed by a failure of physical infrastructure around them,
but by a failure of the social infrastructure. That's much
(29:42):
harder to see, to measure, or to fix. But the
failure was all around them, constraining every single day of
their lives. Heat continues to be a killer. The World
(30:02):
Health Organization estimates that between nineteen ninety eight and twenty seventeen,
one hundred and sixty six thousand people died owing to
heat waves, yet they rarely get the attention that we
would devote to a volcano, a tsunami, or a wildfire.
And because the global climate is changing, extreme heat waves
(30:22):
are becoming much more common. Events that we might expect
once in fifty thousand years we might now see every
decade or so. So we're going to have to get
used to scorching temperatures and smothering humidity, and that makes
it all the more important to understand what happened in
Chicago a quarter of a century ago. We can't prevent
(30:46):
heat waves, but there's a lot we can do to
make them less dangerous. The physical shape of neighborhoods can
make them heat wave prone or heat wave resistant. A
city block with tarmac and concrete, little shade and rapid
drainage of water can be several degrees hotter than one
with a shade of trees or patches of vegetation that
(31:08):
catch water and let it evaporate. Leafy neighborhoods tend to
be a great deal cooler, and it will surprise nobody
to hear that leafy neighborhoods also tend to be richer.
A recent study in the journal Climate found that historically
red lined areas in US cities are an average of
(31:28):
four point five degrees fahrenheit warmer. These areas are mostly
African American, denied federal mortgage support in the nineteen thirties
and long marginalized afterwards. North Lawndale is one of them.
But while this is all so depressing, doesn't it also
(31:50):
offer some hope. When we think about adapting to climate change,
we often think of expensive defenses, such as dikes and
flood barriers, or waterproofing power and transport infrastructure so that
it copes better with extreme conditions. For some places, that's
a cost we're going to have to swallow. But the
(32:11):
experience of Chicago suggests that there's another kind of adaptation,
another kind of weatherproofing, supporting vibrant neighborhoods, planting trees and
laying out parks, reducing crime and encouraging local businesses, funding
libraries and community centers. I'm not saying it's easy to
(32:31):
turn a failing neighborhood into a thriving one, but I
am saying that it's the kind of thing we'd want
to do anyway. The flourishing community of South Lawndale protected
its vulnerable residence in a way that the threadbare community
of North Lawndale just couldn't. But that wasn't some expensive
(32:52):
precaution that paid off only in a crisis. It was
a natural consequence of the way South Lawndale worked every
hour of every day, making it a far happier, healthier,
safer place to live. Paul Jankovitz remember, was isolated and afraid,
(33:13):
but she had a friend she could call. When we
left Pauline, she had gone quiet. Her friend was on
the other end of the telephone, waiting, increasingly anxious. At last,
Pauline came back on the line. She was okay. Pauline
had been dipping her head in water, then brought wet
(33:33):
towels back to the bed. She turned on her fan
and lay down under the towels with a fan blowing
over her. She lost track of time a bit, then
remembered that her friend was still on the line. Thanks
for waiting for me. I feel a lot better now.
I'm going to keep using the towels and the fan
is working, And it was working Pauline hung up, lay
(33:56):
down again, and waited to regain her strength. Looking back,
she laughed about it. She told the sociologist Eric Klinnenberg.
I have a special way to beat the heat. I
like to go on a Caribbean cruise. I get several
washcloths and dip them in cold water, but I placed
them over my eyes so that I can't see. I
(34:17):
lie down and set the fan directly on me. The
wet towels and the wind from the fan give a
cool breeze, and I imagine myself on a cruise around
the islands, even in the humidity. The towels and the
fan help, but so do the friends. My friends though
about my cruises too, so when they call me on
(34:39):
hot days, they all say, Hi, Pauline, how was your trip?
We laugh about it, but it keeps me alive. But
what if the virtual cruise hadn't worked? What if Pauline
had passed out her friend was still on the line.
Should have called the ambulance, don't just knock on the door.
Should have said, break it down. I know she's in there.
(35:00):
I was talking to her when she stopped responding. Pauline
was vulnerable, and she was isolated, but she had someone
looking out for her, someone she could trust. Everybody should,
but in Chicago, not everybody did. The last forty one
(35:26):
victims of the Chicago heatwave were buried six weeks later
in a mass grave one hundred and sixty feet long.
They were so alone that even after death, nobody came
to claim them. Forty one simple pine boxes were laid
side by side and the six foot deep trench. Each
(35:47):
had a brass tag with a number. County investigators had
tried to track down the families of each victim for
them to arrange a funeral. Often they had succeeded. These
forty one were the ones who were left Edward Hoffmann,
Leonard Himer, Liza Kimberly, all As Yenchovich, Lydia Payne, Thomas Randall,
(36:13):
William Reidsville, Robert Yankovich, Ethel Young. Sometimes no family member
could be found, Sometimes the family didn't want to get involved.
A few people had shown up to bear witness during
the brief service. Some were solemn, some angry, some were
(36:38):
simply sobbing. If any of these living knew any of
the dead, they did not admit it. Eric Klinenbergh's book
(37:06):
is heat Wave. For a full list of our sources,
see Tim Harford dot com. Cautionary Tales is written by
me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan
Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and Emily Vaughan. The
(37:30):
sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge,
Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have
been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg,
Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton, Carlie mcgliori, Eric Sandler,
(37:51):
Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano, Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig.
Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review,
tell a friend, tell two friends, and if you want
to hear the show ads free listen to four exclusive
Cautionary Tale shorts. Then sign up for Pushkin Plus on
(38:14):
the show page and Apple podcast, or at Pushkin dot fm,
slash plus,
Host
Tim Harford
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