The combined effects of this week’s sweltering heat and a violent thunderstorm continued to be felt Wednesday as officials confirmed four more heat-related deaths and thousands of homes in the area still without electricity.
Seven deaths have been attributed to the recent high temperatures so far.
On Wednesday, the Cook County medical examiner’s office ruled that three Chicago men and a man from Blue Island were the latest heat-related casualties.
William Krause, 49, of the 4100 block of West 58th Street was found dead Tuesday in his home of heat-related causes, officials said Wednesday. Neighbors said Krause lived with his mother, who was hospitalized last week with a broken hip, and rarely, if ever, left the brick bungalow.
“I feel bad because I’m his next-door neighbor but I never knew him,” said Maggie Magana, 44, who has lived in her home for about five years and often spoke with Krause’s mother. “I was shocked that there was somebody in there [when police arrived Tuesday]. It’s a sad thing, because that’s a human being over there.”
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The examiner’s office also said the deaths Tuesday of Michael McCleary, 56, of the 100 block of West Division Street and Richard Henry, 60, of the 600 block of South Campbell Avenue were heat related.
Clarence Randall, 58, of the 2300 block of West 119th Street, Blue Island, was found unresponsive Tuesday in his home, according to the examiner’s office. His death was ruled Wednesday to be heat related.
Heat was cited Tuesday as the factor in the deaths of three women; two from Chicago and one from Hanover Park.
The near 100-degree heat on Sunday and Monday stifled the Chicago region. On Tuesday, as cleanup began from the previous night’s storm, a high temperature of 80 degrees in the city offered a brief respite.
On Wednesday, the temperature reached 85 at Northerly Island, with a heat index–the combined effects of heat and humidity–of 95, said Chris Gitro of the National Weather Service’s Chicago office.
Severe thunderstorms and heavy rain was forecast for Wednesday night, Gitro said, and was expected to continue through Thursday, with a high in the upper 80s.
The violent storm late Monday wreaked havoc across the area, causing about 1,200 “tree emergencies” in Chicago alone.
The storm also knocked down more than 1,000 power lines and helped destroy more than 500 utility transformers, Commonwealth Edison Co. spokesman John Dewey said.
“We had extensive damage,” Dewey said. “In some areas, we basically had to rebuild our system. The winds were in excess of 60 m.p.h.”
Shortly after the storm struck, more than 110,000 homes across northern Illinois were without electricity. That number had been whittled to 6,700 by mid-afternoon Wednesday, but rose to 9,800 homes by early evening after severe thunderstorms hit. Late Wednesday, 3,539 customers remained without power.
ComEd serves 3.7 million people in northern Illinois, Dewey said.
Sue Khan, of the 7100 block of West Devon Avenue, said she and her three children have been refilling a cooler with ice and ordering take-out food since they lost electricity Monday night.
By 6 p.m. Wednesday, she was irate.
“It’s a public-safety issue,” Khan said in a phone interview. “We are barely getting by. [ComEd] is running us ragged … I just want electricity.”
The company had more than 300 crews working to restore service, Dewey said. A total of 100 additional crews from utility providers in St. Louis and Indianapolis helped the effort.
Dewey said the outages were caused by the storm and not because of the heat. He said the company expected service to customers who lost electricity Monday night to be restored by late Wednesday.
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