Chicago Death Toll From Heat Could Top 100

The unrelenting heat wave that clamped down on the eastern half of the nation became a slow-motion disaster here Saturday as at least 56 Chicagoans died of heat complications, many succumbing inside unvented homes that became furnaces. Health authorities warned that the heat-related toll in Chicago alone could pass 100.

“It’s as significant as any plane crash,” said Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund R. Donoghue. “We’re probably going to end up with well over 100 deaths.”

From the Great Plains to New England, the stifling weather accounted for at least 108 deaths. It strained municipal services in dozens of cities and caused millions of dollars in losses on farms where cattle and poultry died under the punishing sun.

While the weakening hot air mass gave way to slightly cooler temperatures across the upper Midwest and into the Northeast, its movement touched off severe thunderstorms. Falling trees killed five people in New York state, and lightning was apparently blamed for the death of a woman in Massachusetts.

The rain came to Chicago late Saturday, misting down over Lake Michigan even as temperatures still hovered in the 90s after a high of 98. But the rain came too late.

All day and into the night Saturday, paramedic vans and police wagons pulled up into the emergency entrance of the Cook County medical examiner’s office. At times, the vans had to wait in line to unload the dead.

“It’s a madhouse,” said a coroner’s investigator. “They’re bringing them in so fast the police don’t even have time to tell us how they died.”

The county morgue, which usually handles 15 to 20 bodies even on a hectic weekend night, was overwhelmed by early Saturday, with more than 80 corpses. A stunned Donoghue said Saturday night that overworked pathologists had not yet conducted autopsies on 50 more bodies, many also expected to be heat victims.

At the morgue, doctors were forced to borrow a refrigerated truck from Illinois state officials to house some of the corpses. Paramedics and hospital workers were asked to consider sending some bodies directly to funeral homes.

Health officials said many of the dead were elderly residents whose resistance ebbed as they waited inside dwellings that either had no fans and air conditioners or lost power during the sporadic blackouts that have plagued the city in recent days.

“These are mostly older, weakened people who are dying at home alone,” said Tim Hadac at the city’s Department of Health.

At public housing projects and senior apartments in poor neighborhoods, city emergency workers brought food and ice to residents and urged others to move into city-operated cooling centers.

“Oh, it’s hot, you can’t sleep,” said 94-year-old Inez Anderson, who lives in a senior citizens’ complex where a man in his 70s had died of heatstroke.

“Our teams are seeing people on the verge of heat exhaustion,” said Henry Locke, a spokesman for the city’s Department of Human Services. “The problem is a lot of people say they can tough it out. We can only do so much.”

The sudden spate of fatalities began late Friday night after a large swath of the city’s North Side was blacked out when a Commonwealth Edison electric substation caught fire. At least 41,000 residents were without power, many until morning, said Commonwealth Edison spokesman Peter Papakyriacou. At least 8,500 were without power Saturday afternoon.

“We have Mother Nature to battle against and also the fact that our customers will turn around and use that much more electricity,” Papakyriacou said.

In the superheated darkness Friday night, apartment dwellers began deluging city emergency phone lines with complaints. “We got 35 calls from one [North Side] building,” said Locke, “and when our emergency team got there, they found a senior had died.”

Two 3-year-old boys perished in a four-wheel-drive vehicle where they had been left by a child-care worker who forgot that she had left them there, police said. On the city’s South Side, the bodies of two elderly sisters who were discovered dead by a visiting nurse lay in their ramshackle wood-panel home for three hours until overwhelmed authorities finally arrived to take them away.

Hospital emergency rooms were swamped with elderly victims, some stricken with heart attacks, others so overcome by heat that their “skin was hot to [the] touch,” said one nurse at Jackson Park Hospital. At Christ Hospital and Medical Center, nurse Linda Pula said doctors rehydrated dozens of patients.

“We’ve had so many people in for heat exhaustion I’ve lost count,” Pula said.

The heat was directly involved in five deaths in Milwaukee and may have contributed to 10 more, Milwaukee County Medical Examiner Jeffrey Jentzen said Saturday. Other deaths over the past week have included 11 in Missouri, six in Indiana, two each in Kentucky and Iowa, and one each in Texas and Nebraska.

In Philadelphia, where Saturday was the hottest day in 29 years with a high of 103, officials blamed two deaths on the heat, including that of a man found in his car.

Ahead of the easing temperatures, records fell: It hit 105 in Danbury, Conn.; 101 in Norfolk, Va.; 100 in Atlanta, and 102 in New York City’s Central Park, where trees and grass offer some relief from the blistering urban canyons of concrete, brick and asphalt.

Times researcher John Beckham and Times wire services contributed to this story.