In a frightening echo of 1995’s heat disaster, the hottest days in the Chicago area in four years claimed as many as 57 lives Friday and early Saturday, amid power outages that at times left up to 100,000 households virtually defenseless against searing temperatures.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office said Saturday that 25 deaths had been linked to temperatures that topped 100 degrees and heat indexes that hovered near 120 on Thursday and Friday. Investigators also were looking at 30 additional deaths in Cook County that they believed likely were heat related.
In addition, Lake County on Saturday reported two heat-related deaths.
Even with the new victims, the toll trails that of 1995, when 85 heat-related deaths occurred the first day after the hottest temperatures, on the way to a total of more than 700 dead.
The danger is not past, Chicago officials said at a news conference.
“Just because it will be cooler today doesn’t mean everyone will be able to get through,” said Mayor Richard Daley, who called on residents to help city workers look after the elderly and other groups at risk from the heat.
“You have to check on them, because you could save their life,” Daley said.
Hope for relief came from forecasts that temperatures would drop further after a slight improvement Saturday, with highs projected in the low 80s for Sunday and merciful lows in the mid-60s. The cooler temperatures prompted the National Weather Service to cancel its heat advisory Saturday.
Residents and city officials on Saturday continued venting frustration with Commonwealth Edison over outages that left 26,000 homes without power for more than 24 hours. As of 8 p.m., ComEd officials said, 11,500 homes citywide remained without power.
The North Side outage was caused by a transformer failure in a substation at Addison Street and California Avenue. During the 1995 heat wave, the same substation suffered a fire that deprived 41,000 North Side residents of power for more than a day.
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Jacquelyn Heard, Daley’s press secretary, said the mayor had not known the same substation was responsible for both failures. But she expanded on Daley’s comments at the earlier press conference, when he said he was “upset” about the outage.
“I think people who lost power deserve some answers,” Heard said. “The mayor was very clear he would hold ComEd responsible. We’re going to see to it that they follow through with the work, and this is not just empty promises.”
Martin Cohen, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a watchdog group, was more direct in his criticism.
“It’s apparent the system on the North Side is not engineered properly,” Cohen said. “That should have been apparent four years ago. There aren’t any excuses for not providing power when people most need it.”
ComEd spokesman Steve Solomon said the eight transformers that failed at the station had been inspected weekly. Some had been installed as far back as the early 1980s, he said, noting that such electrical equipment can have a lifespan of 40 to 50 years under normal conditions.
But the demand late last week was anything but normal.
“This isn’t a situation of maintenance or upgrades not being done at that station,” Solomon said. “This is a situation of peak demand records being beaten five times in two weeks.
“Frankly, the system as a whole has held up extremely well.”
Local power performance has been trouble-free compared to other cities this summer, Solomon said. In early July, record temperatures topping 100 degrees caused blackouts affecting 200,000 residences in New York, prompting Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to charge that the power utility was woefully unprepared.
After the lessons of 1995, no officials in Chicago could claim ignorance of the mayhem that heat can unleash. The deaths and power crisis come despite a citywide emergency plan implemented after 1995 and forecasts that accurately predicted high temperatures Thursday and Friday.
Power crews from as far away as Rockford and Maywood worked non-stop, beginning at 11 p.m. Friday night, when a portable transformer was hauled to the Addison substation, ComEd officials said.
The mechanical problems with the transformers differ from those suffered at the substation in 1995, according to ComEd. In 1995, transformers overloaded, but this year the transformers weren’t considered stressed.
Crews worked all Saturday to bring the transformers online, but early estimates that the task would be completed by mid-afternoon proved overly optimistic.
Steve Wickman, a ComEd supervisor and substation engineer who is part of the team trying to bring the plant back to power, said the temporary transformers carry about half the power of one of the failed transformers.
The two working transformers at the substation were hosed down by Chicago firefighters for most of the day to keep them cool.
Although there was no way of knowing Saturday whether the North Side outage contributed to the death toll, four victims at the medical examiner’s office had addresses within the outage area or on its borders.
Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue said he doubts the deaths were linked to power outages. Heat-related deaths most often are the result of extended exposure to broiling conditions over a period of a day or more, Donoghue said, so an outage late Friday might not have had much impact.
“People who had air conditioning would be cooled off already.” Donoghue said. “A short power outage wouldn’t cause too many problems.”
But he said the lack of air conditioning might be an issue if power outages continued for more than 24 hours. That danger was a possibility late Saturday because of the thousands of residences still without power.
Donoghue also praised the city’s emergency response plan for trying to find people suffering from the heat.
“I think the city has done everything they can,” Donoghue said. “Older people are difficult to reach. When you look into this, I think you’ll find (the victims) were people who were living alone.”
Many heat deaths reported Saturday fit Donoghue’s profile. Evelyn Doss, 86, had resisted getting air conditioning for her home on the South Side, partly because it caused her arthritis to flare up, said Florida Ware, a relative who lived nearby.
City agencies were scrambling to help those who might have been incapacitated by Friday’s blistering heat. The Chicago Housing Authority was making well-being checks on all 14,000 seniors in its buildings, with three checks daily for some residents. Such visits turned up four heat deaths Saturday, according to CHA Director Phil Jackson.
The Chicago Police Department, the Department of Human Services and Department on Aging check on senior citizens in nursing homes and others who ask at least once a day, according to officials.
If no one answers the phone or the person sounds weak, a squad car is sent to the home, and officers knock on the door, question neighbors and try to contact relatives, police spokesman Pat Camden said. They also are authorized to knock down a door.
Camden said Saturday that the Police Department had made 3,020 such checks since Thursday morning.
The definition of what exactly constitutes a heat-related death was questioned after the 1995 disaster. Some local health officials balked at Donoghue’s reports that hundreds of people had died from the heat, theorizing that the heat was just the last stress for people who were close to death.
Donoghue and other medical examiners have since led attempts to create uniform guidelines. Victims typically have body temperatures in excess of 105 degrees before they die, though experts say other factors can justify classifying a death as heat-related.
The broader criteria include people with heart conditions who make an attempt to cool off before dying. Elevated levels of certain liver and muscle enzymes or signs of mental disorientation can also lead to a verdict that heat played a role.
Most victims are not near death when heat strikes, according to Donoghue. Otherwise, they already would be in hospitals or nursing homes with air conditioning. The heat claims people who are frail but independent enough to live on their own, who might have lived additional years if not for the heat.
The disproportionate toll in Cook County arises in part from the fact that Chicago’s vast expanses of concrete and asphalt tend to trap heat, yielding temperatures 3 to 4 degrees above those in the suburbs, experts say. The city also is home to more poor residents who cannot afford air conditioning.
Before late Friday, the heat wave had claimed 13 lives in Cook County and one in Kane County in the past 10 days.
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The weekend’s only heat-related deaths outside Cook were the two in Lake County.
A 91-year-old Highland Park man died Saturday morning at Highland Park Hospital after suffering heat stroke at home Friday night, said Jim Wipper, deputy coroner.
A Maryland woman in town to see her brother graduate from Great Lakes Naval Training Center died Thursday, although Wipper said the heat was only a complicating factor to heart and respiratory problems.
Aside from the local crisis, nearly 100 heat-related deaths outside the Chicago area have been reported since mid-July.
In more than a dozen states, people were found dead in homes and apartments without air conditioning or fans.
In Missouri, 39 deaths were blamed on the heat.
The lack of electricity for air conditioning drove multitudes into the streets or the lake, seeking relief. Chicago Park District spokeswoman Angelynne Amores said an estimated 450,000 people stormed the lakefront Friday.
Adam Knoll, 69, spent the night sleeping on a pier near his home on Virginia Street along the north branch of the Chicago River.
“The river was nice and cool,” Knoll said.
Weighing stifling heat versus his safety on the street, Knoll said he chose the lesser of two evils.
“I didn’t feel safe in the house where it was boiling,” he said.
Tribune staff writers Anthony Colarossi, Bechetta Jackson, James Janega and Anthony Burke Boylan contributed to this report.