COLUMN ONE : Heat Wave: Why Did So Many Die? : The toll in Chicago topped 400, amid claims that the public response system offered too little, too late. For some, including the elderly, not knowing how to cope with sweltering weather proved fatal.

In retrospect, an alarm did sound that death was on the way.

The alert came from Iowa, where oven-like air was powerful enough to fell tens of thousands of cattle, turkeys, chickens and hogs. Their carcasses rotted swiftly in the sun.

“That,” says Gary McCray, a physician specializing in geriatric care, “should have been the tip-off.” The brutal heat was headed for Chicago.

It arrived on July 12 and stayed for five days, including two consecutive days of triple-digit temperatures. At one point the thermometer at Midway Airport read 106 degrees.

Even so, no one figured that the sweltering summer of 1995 would claim the lives of more than 450 people in Cook County, most of them elderly, many of them poor, most of them living alone. No one expected fatalities on the scale of an airliner crash or the great fire that leveled the city in 1871.

“The city got blindsided,” said one staffer with the Chicago Department of Aging. “We weren’t ready.”

Why the tally of the dead rose so astonishingly high--causing a traffic jam of hearses and police squadrols at the morgue for days--is a question with many answers. It has left the city divided between those who believe the tragedy was an unavoidable act of nature and those who say it could--and should--have been prevented.

The search for scapegoats is well under way.

The Illinois Commerce Commission is investigating Commonwealth Edison, the utility that lit up Wrigley Field for a Cubs night game while neighboring streets lost electricity. Republicans in the state Senate have called for an investigation of Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley’s handling of the crisis. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will study the medical examiner’s criteria for judging whether a death was linked to the heat. Daley is appointing a committee to investigate just about everything it can.

A lawyer has already filed the first class-action suit, against CommEd.

The circumstances, they all will find, are complicated.

The combination of heat, humidity--which makes perspiring less effective--and a sky without cloud cover was unprecedented here. The center of the scorching air mass responsible for the misery across the Midwest and East Coast stalled directly over Chicago and Milwaukee, 81 miles to the north, which experienced a proportionally similar death rate.

When the heat persisted, “the red light should go on,” said McCray. “Every degree above 98.6 [body temperature] is much more critical than every degree below it.”

There was not even a chance for relief at night, when the thermometer hovered in the high 80s and low 90s--above the normal 84-degree daytime high for July.

People who live in the Great Lakes region have not had a chance to acclimate their bodies to such steamy weather for such extended periods.

“A hundred degrees to a Chicago resident is a lot worse than 100 degrees to a Phoenix resident,” said Lawrence Kalkstein, a University of Delaware climatologist who has studied heat deaths. And those in the Midwest may not be as familiar with ways to lessen the heat’s effects.

Also, Chicago’s homes and high-rises are designed with the region’s bone-chilling winters in mind, with minimal cross-ventilation to retain heat.

Fear of crime also kept many windows locked tight.

To some people caught up in the crisis, it seemed there was little that could have been done to thwart nature’s course.

‘An Act of God’

“This is an act of God, a disaster akin to a hurricane or flood,” said Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund R. Donoghue at a news conference Thursday. “I don’t think any human being is responsible for this.”

Still, the first public warnings lacked urgency. The National Weather Service sent out an advisory July 11: Don’t over-exert yourself, drink liquids. The Department of Aging handed out its “Stay cool” brochure with hot-weather tips, as it had since June.

City government did not fully mobilize until hundreds had died, temperatures were falling and the crisis had become a matter more of politics than of public health.

Then there is the nature of the populace: tough, independent. Perhaps ornery is not too strong a word. Take the group of senior citizens who rejected the offer of an air-conditioned bus to take them from their downtown apartment building to a city cooling center. One later died.

Take Walter Waiter, 81, who told neighbors that he’d get through the heat just fine.

His body was discovered last Friday in his superheated beige brick house.

All his windows were closed; many were painted shut. Two small fans sat unused in a closet. He had long scorned air conditioners as “too high-tech for me,” his downstairs tenant, Fred Gunther, recalled.

The scene was repeated elsewhere on the North Side, where Waiter lived, and on the South Side as well, mostly in poor neighborhoods. Paramedics believe that Waiter, like scores of victims, actually died on July 13, when temperatures reached their peak. Many bodies were already decomposing when they were found.

Chicago is not the first city to suffer through such a heat disaster. Kansas City and St. Louis, with much smaller populations than Chicago, recorded 133 and 113 deaths, respectively, in July, 1980. Philadelphia reported 118 deaths in 1993.

Those cities now have heat plans, each born of their own catastrophes. “We just hammer home what happened in 1980,” said Daniel J. Lindholm, manager of emergency medical services for Kansas City’s health department. “People hear this every summer and we just pound this into their heads. You ask any Kansas City resident and they know.”

Kansas City and St. Louis issue heat alerts, similar to smog advisories in Southern California. As the sense of emergency heightens, air-conditioned public buildings, charities and churches open their doors to the afflicted and at-risk.

Philadelphia works with a University of Delaware climatologist, who warns municipal leaders when killer heat is headed that way. Then the city sets up a hot line and a buddy system for senior citizens.

There is no definitive proof that the plans work. But this year, with about 700 heat deaths around the country, Philadelphia reported 18; St. Louis, 17, and Kansas City, 9.

Now Chicago is following their lead. The mayor announced a revised heat plan Thursday that mirrors the St. Louis-Kansas City model. It will replace what one alderman called “a skimpy plan,” a 1 1/2-page set of rules put into effect after it was too late.

Jennifer Neary, executive director of an advocacy group called Metro Seniors in Action, said the city should have taken stronger measures.

“If they can dispatch snowplows in anticipation of a snowstorm, they could have done something about this,” she said. “If they can find the people that need absentee ballots at election time, they could have found the seniors last week.”

Insisted Daley: “The city did a very good job.” But, he added: “We could have done better.”

Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez has admitted that his department’s “senior units,” which are special patrols charged with monitoring the well-being of the elderly, could have been put on overtime, but weren’t during the peak heat. The Fire Department has been criticized for a shortage of ambulances; firetrucks, with no qualified paramedics aboard, were often dispatched instead.

Elderly residents who telephoned city departments to complain of their discomfort say they didn’t get responses until after the worst heat was over.

Cooling Centers

While the city administration noted that few took advantage of Chicago’s official “cooling centers”--six air-conditioned municipal buildings opened to the public on extremely hot days--a neighbor of Walter Waiter’s criticized the low-key promotion of the havens.

“I don’t think anyone around here knew” about the nearest center, said Helen Navarro, a 38-year-old homemaker. After Waiter’s death, she went by the local cooling center. “When you look at it from outside,” she said, “it’s just one more city building.

“They don’t tell you it’s a place to get cool. It should say in big letters: COOLING CENTER--FREE--COME IN! Then maybe people would use it.”

In other cases, air conditioning failed at one center and some who sought refuge at another say it was closed over the weekend.

Morgue workers were stunned last Friday by the number of bodies that began to arrive.

Not until Sunday did Daley summon his aides to come up with a stronger response to the crisis. He knows his history; Chicago voters ousted Mayor Michael Bilandic in 1979 because they were upset about delays in street plowing after a major blizzard.

The commissioner on aging was ordered into work, where he sat until midafternoon while the administration pondered. Weekday bureaucrats were pulled in to staff phone information banks. Workers were sent to knock on doors to check on elderly residents.

And Daley went on television to urge every citizen to look in on older neighbors.

Meanwhile, he also railed at Commonwealth Edison for the power outages. The blackouts, however, were concentrated on the North Side while deaths were reported all over the city. And Milwaukee experienced only brownouts, never losing power completely.

What Chicago needs, more than anything else, is a simple change in attitude, suggested Peter Beltemacchi, who tried in vain to persuade colleagues at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is associate dean of architecture, to go home until the heat spell was over.

Although he grew up in Chicago, “I had a grandmother who lived in Alabama for a while,” he recalled, “and whenever it got hot, she’d tell us: ‘Cover your head. Stay out of the sun. Don’t move around so much.’ You don’t learn those kind of things in the North.”

Waiter, a lifelong Chicagoan, was a case in point.

The constant pain in his arms and legs grew worse whenever the temperatures soared, his tenant said. “When he got too hot, he’d get the shakes,” said the 89-year-old Gunther. “Sometimes, he’d pass out.”

Last week, Waiter gave no indication he was taking extra precautions. One day, he showed up at the downstairs flat. The two old men were sweating and Gunther asked Waiter what he was going to do.

“If it’s real bad,” he recalls Waiter saying, “I might put a rag in cold water and put it on my arms.”

Or maybe, Waiter added, he might take off his shirt.