Whenever it gets this knuckle-cracking cold, Jim Crier remembers the two frozen years he spent at an Air Force base in Fairbanks, Alaska. Wind chills of 100 below. Whole months without sunlight.
So how does the Chicago area stack up?
“It’s worse,” Crier said after he pumped gas at a gas station on Golf Road in Arlington Heights.
“Up there it’s a dry cold,” Crier explained. “There’s not much moisture in the air. I just have to mentally think of Fairbanks and I warm right up.”
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Throughout the Chicago area Saturday, most people played it smart and stayed inside on the coldest day so far this winter season. But for gas station attendants, street salesmen, delivery workers, police and the homeless, the blustering cold had to be faced-usually with a sweater, hat, heavy coat, gloves and a scarf.
O’Hare International Airport on Saturday reached a low of 6 degrees below zero at 8 a.m., according to Steve Toci, a meteorologist with the Central Weather Service. Morning wind chills dipped to a bone-rattling 32 degrees below zero, making it the coldest day since winter began. The afternoon high was 8 above.
The area forecast was for warmer weather Sunday, but only slightly. Morning lows will remain in the negative single digits, ranging from 2 below at the lakefront to 8 below in the suburbs. But afternoon highs should climb to around 16 degrees under mostly cloudy skies. Southern gusts will make that seem like 10 below, Toci said.
The frigid conditions bring the ever-present danger of frostbite, but area hospitals reported no patients with severe frostbite cases.
The low temperatures were expected to bring homeless flocking to area shelters Saturday night.
The frigid air also brought on car trouble. Celvin Erazo, 16, a mechanic at the Citgo at North and Kedzie Avenues, said he had to turn motorists away. “Trouble starting, heaters out, blowers out, tuneups for the cold weather. . . . We are very busy,” he said.
Sal Pecodaro showed up for work in his regular dress shirt and slacks. But the Jewel/Osco at 53rd Street and Pulaski Road needed people in the parking lot, to carry in carts and scrape ice.
“We normally have to work out here in seven-hour shifts, with only two breaks,” the 16-year-old said as he shivered in a flimsy jacket as the temperature hovered around 5 degrees. “Me and a buddy are trading in hour shifts so we can warm up a little.”
As he wheeled a row of clanging shopping carts toward the warmth of the store, he evaluated his career. “This isn’t worth it,” he said, his breath dissolving in pale vapors above his head. “If they make me do another shift like this again, I’m quitting.”
Meanwhile on the Near North Side, Rolando Robinson, 35, selling newspapers to drivers at Dearborn and Ontario Streets, came prepared for the cold.
“I knew I was going to be out here all day,” he said.
He wore five pairs of pants, two shirts, four pairs of socks, heavy shoes, a vest, a jacket with a hood. Robinson said he planned to work all day, because he needed money for rent at a hotel for transients.
“This cold is awful,” he said. “But I’m just glad I got a chance to make some money.”