The calls were put on hold as they flooded in, the 10 phone lines blinking like an airport runway.
Two dispatchers, eyes glued to computer screens, whipped through well-rehearsed questions as they “talked down” callers who had awakened to a winter nightmare.
“You have no heat? Can you check to see if the switch and pilot light are on?”
It was only 9 a.m., and the Anderson Heating & Cooling Co. in Tinley Park had booked 42 emergency service calls.
The furnace fixers were just some of the busy people on the front lines of Tuesday’s subzero cold snap. There were others all over the area, from toll collectors to firefighters to postal carriers to tow truck drivers, with stories that really described the situation.
The temperature, which bottomed out at 21 degrees below zero at 8 a.m. at O’Hare International Airport and reached a high of 11 below, was six notches short of the lowest Chicago mark and equaled the coldest high. Forecasters were predicting that overnight it would get back to 20 below.
In some instances, the weather was dangerous.
Heaters cranked to full blast started fires, while downed lines left 20,000 people without power. A frozen water pipe burst at the Kluczynski Federal Building in the Loop, sending streams of water down seven floors.
Other people suffered from hypothermia, and a 91-year-old woman who was found frozen Monday in her home was upgraded to serious and stable condition.
But most people suffered only from inconvenience. About 400 flights were canceled at O’Hare. Trains on the Chicago Transit Authority’s Dan Ryan-Howard Red Line were more crowded than usual because some of the CTA’s cars had suffered cold-related mechanical problems.
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Chicago’s garbage was not picked up Tuesday and won’t be Wednesday. Most schools were closed and will remain shut for at least another day.
Wednesday was predicted to be only slightly warmer, with a high around zero to 5 above, before temperatures-and lives-return to normal.
The heat seekers
Debbie Swanson, a Anderson Heating dispatcher, checked another blinking screen and assigned each caller a technician. Then she juggled the day’s appointments all over again, prioritizing the no-heat calls in a kind of triage: Is the person elderly? Are small children involved? Non-emergency calls go to the bottom.
“The no-heats are the priority,” she said. “A lot of them are really upset and worried, so you have to keep your voice at a mellow tone.”
Swanson paused to take a radio message from one of the company’s 10 technicians.
“Your truck is down? You can’t start it? Anything can happen today. We have so many no-heats today we’ll have to send someone to get you.”
By 10 a.m., a Park Forest family had been without heat for about four hours and the inside temperature was nearing 50 degrees. Steven and Christine Sendgikoski added another layer of clothing to their 14-month-old son Kyle, who was cooperating by keeping his socks and booties on for a change.
After a carbon monoxide and gas-leak check turned up clean, field foreman Tim Ingalls announced that the furnace needed a new blower motor. The cost: $275 installed. The $1,400 new furnace can wait for another year or so.
“Do it, we need it,” said Steven Sendgikoski. “We need it now.”
Torch extinguished
Like soldiers wielding weapons, plumbers were called to the front lines with blowtorches at the ready.
For Bill Regan, a grizzled Chicagoan who has encountered every type of winter mishap in 25 years on the job, this was a topper. When the cold froze his tank of liquid propane, it left his torch about as useful as a toothpick.
“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Regan, who was trying to defrost a sewer main outside a home on the 1900 block of North Dayton Street. “It’s hard to keep anything working out here. My electric thawers don’t work it’s so cold.
“When we’re really busy is the time of year you really don’t want to work outside. That’s the bad thing about it.”
Tow driver hears tales
Inside his coarse denim jumpsuit, three sweat shirts, long underwear and two pairs of socks, Ron Mazzio is more than a tow truck driver. He’s a motorist’s therapist.
On Tuesday, he dispensed plenty of therapy, which in most cases amounted to allowing his clients the cleansing experience of explaining the specific problem that had rendered their automobiles helpless.
“Oh, God, I had a lady the other day tell me her whole life story,” said Mazzio, 27, of Wheaton while he was attempting to wedge his 25-foot, flatbed truck between a garage and a stalled car in Lombard. “She told me the last time she drove it, where she went, what she bought. I was starting to go nuts, but you just sit and listen and let them go on. It’s not that bad.”
Mazzio’s tow doesn’t mean the car will be running soon.
“I’m not giving any time commitment to customers,” said Randy Shannon, owner of Shannon’s Specialty auto repair in Lombard. He looked through frosted windows of his station at the 43 cars that made it impossible for him to accept additional vehicles. “It could be Wednesday. It could be Friday. I just don’t know yet.”
A toll on collectors
Tuesday wasn’t such a bad day to be a toll collector, according to Jerome Adams, as long as you kept a positive attitude, wore layers of clothes and had a vat of industrial-strength hand lotion.
His colleague, Susie Wosik, wasn’t buying it.
“Don’t tell me your hands aren’t cold,” the 39-year-old snarled. “My hands were turning purple this morning. “It’s sick, that’s what it is.”
The collectors found little sympathy from Juan Baez, a 36-year-old “lane walker” who spends his entire shift outside making sure the toll machines work. Dressed in a bright orange thermal jumpsuit with a Chicago Bulls scarf wrapped across his face, Baez said he keeps moving to stay warm.
As cold as it was, Adams said he doesn’t appreciate motorists who warm up their coins before reaching the tollbooth.
“The dreaded ones are the ones who have the money in their mouths and then give it to you,” he said. “You try to get the money in the palm of your hand so you don’t have to touch it with your fingers.”
Firefighters’ nightmare
With ice covering his coat and hanging from the front of his helmet extending nearly to his nose, a firefighter from Engine Company 82 emerged from a smoke-filled South Side alley. He was among nearly 100 firefighters called to battle an extra-alram blaze in a three-story Chatham apartment building.
“I’m not as cold as I look,” he said. “I’m waiting to be relieved, then I’ll go home, have a hot chocolate and go to bed.”
For the others, it is the worst of times to be a firefighter: Water, a key to firefighting efforts, froze in minutes and rendered the best of equipment useless.
Three South Side fires quickly rose to extra-alarm blazes, and fighting the cold took as much skill as battling the fires.
“You dress for it,” said one firefighter. “You get used to it in a way. I think that the ice on these heavy jackets provides insulation.”
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“We carry a change of clothes and extra socks in a plastic bag,” said a lieutenant as he arrived for duty. “If we do get wet, then we can change in the cab of our truck. The people in the neighborhood, they are always real good about letting us in to their houses to change.”
Quiet at the hospital
The doors to the emergency room at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn glided open and the faces of Dr. Michael Lambert and Dr. Jerry Mothershead were blasted by the piercing air.
They did little more than shudder and immediately moved into action, wheeling the stretcher into the first empty trauma room.
Their patient: An 83-year-old man who had warned his family against shoveling snow in the cold-and then went out and did it himself. The diagnosis: cardiac arrest.
Medical personnel surrounded his bed. An oxygen mask was placed over his face and a blanket over his body, covering his yellowish skin.
Otherwise, it was kind of slow at the hospital.
“People seem to be behaving appropriately,” Dr. Steven Anneken said. “I guess they’re just staying inside. That’s good for us.”
As she scrawled information with a marker on the wall board that is used to keep track of emergency room patients, a supervisor informed her staff that one nurse was running late because her car wouldn’t start.
Mail gets through
The weather barely fazed postal carrier Dave Ozag, 37, as he began his Arlington Heights route. He was wearing two pairs of long underwear under his gray trousers and had plans to pick up two extra pairs from his Arlington Heights home-one to wear and one to carry with him just in case.
“It’s harder to walk,” he said. “I feel like the Michelin tire guy.”
His other tip: Keep moving at a brisk pace.
“Once you stop, you’re a goner,” said Ozag, a postal carrier for nearly 14 years.
Displaying a stamped and addressed envelope that he had pulled from one home’s mailbox, Ozag said you could tell it was really cold.
“Sometimes it’s too cold to mail letters,” he said. “People leave their letters in the box.”