Note how the blue lines-showing the range of temperatures each day-go completely above the normal temperature range during a few days in late July 1916. From July 1 through July 25, temperatures averaged 3.9 degrees above normal. 2Įven before the worst of the heat struck Chicago, July 1916 had already been hot and unusually sunny. Karl Meyer, the hospital’s medical warden. “I have touched patients whose skins felt like hot roast,” said Dr. Meanwhile, dozens of patients were arriving at Cook County Hospital suffering from heat prostration. The next thing I knew other clerks were throwing water over my face and head.” 1 “I felt myself beginning to grow faint as I sat at the instrument and sank to the floor. “It kept ringing constantly for nearly two hours at one stretch, as the doctors turned in report after report of deaths caused by the heat,” Forsberg told the Chicago Daily News. On July 29, 1916, the telephone rang over and over again at the desk of Charles Forsberg, a clerk in the Cook County coroner’s office. Depending on how you calculate the death toll, it may have been more than a thousand. While that tragedy is well documented, a similar catastrophe from earlier in the city’s history is largely forgotten: In the summer of 1916, several hundred people died during one of the hottest stretches of weather Chicago had ever seen. THIS MONTH-JULY 2020-WAS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF CHICAGO’S MOST NOTORIOUS HEAT WAVE, which killed an estimated 700 people during a scorching week in 1995.
Scroll down or click these links for appendixes on CHICAGO MORTALITY TRENDS and WEATHER RECORDS and SOURCE NOTES.
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