Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 18, 1995 TAG: 9507180070
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In Chicago, where rescue workers and neighbors were continuing to discover bodies in overheated apartments, 179 people were confirmed dead from heat-related causes. Many of them were sick and elderly.
``We suspect that throughout the week people are going to find decomposing bodies,'' said Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue. He stood by an earlier prediction that the final toll in Chicago alone could reach 300.
Weather in the Roanoke Valley has not been nearly as severe as the Midwest's. Monday's high was 93 - seven degrees lower than the record 100 set in 1980.
Residents can look forward to a cooler day today. Highs are expected in the upper 80s, according to the National Weather Service. Evening temperatures will offer relief as they descend to the mid-60s.
Wednesday's high is predicted to be near 90.
Chicago's death toll was unusually high partly because Cook County officials used a broader definition to classify a death as heat-related.
In other cities and states, officials were considering a death heat-related only if heat was the primary cause. In Chicago, heat only had to be a contributing factor.
In Wisconsin, the heat wave was blamed for at least 33 deaths even though coroners said it contributed to more than 40 others.
Deaths reported in Chicago and elsewhere since last week pushed the national death toll from heat and storms to at least 325.
Victims included an 80-year-old Pennsylvania man who had been out sealing his tar driveway in 94-degree heat. In Kenosha County, Wis., an 8-year-old boy in a chest-to-foot body cast died of dehydration. The boy, who had cerebral palsy, was recovering from hip surgery.
The toll topped that of 1987, when at least 96 deaths from the Plains to the East Coast were blamed on heat, but didn't approach the estimated 1,500 fatalities from a 1980 heat wave.
The elderly were the most vulnerable victims. They died quietly and alone, unseen in closed, stifling rooms in the midst of a teeming city.
``When I die, I know what hell is like if I go there,'' said Alva Rodriguez, who was unable to resuscitate her 95-year-old neighbor and whose own apartment registered a 117-degree temperature Friday.
While the mercury rose as high as 106 degrees, those closeted inside with windows closed - even storm windows on - faced temperatures far higher. Many elderly people, too ill or too proud to leave homes that had virtually no cooling systems, succumbed to the heat without ever going outside.
The toll was just becoming apparent Monday to rescue workers and neighbors as they checked on the solitary elderly.
Here are some of their stories:
Mabel Swanson, 87, rarely ventured outside her apartment. After a fall last year, she used a walker and could barely inch her way from room to room. Thursday, she refused neighbor Gaby Kuhn's offer to spend the night in the Kuhn family's air-conditioned apartment.
``She had her own pride,'' said Kuhn, who helped set up fans in Swanson's kitchen, gave her a cold washcloth and made sure the windows were open. ``It wasn't that hot in her apartment.''
In Chicago, a city accustomed to bone-numbing cold, Thursday marked a different weather extreme: The temperature rose to a suffocating 106 degrees.
On Friday, Kuhn found the elderly woman lying on her floor. The coroner said she died of heart disease exacerbated by the heat.
``She had her table set for dinner. The lights were on. She hadn't even taken her evening pills yet,'' Kuhn recalled Monday.
Mae Danielson was a shy widow who at 95 still put on makeup and did her own laundry. She lived in the same Polish neighborhood for 47 years and always kept the chain latched across her door, even when talking to neighbors.
Thursday, next-door neighbor Alva Rodriguez loaned her a fan, but Danielson returned it minutes later. ``She told me she didn't want to catch a cold. She said she would die of the cold,'' Rodriguez recalled Monday.
Friday night, Rodriguez checked on Danielson as she headed to the grocery store. Ten minutes later when she returned, she heard her neighbor's phone ringing and saw the door was open.
She found Danielson on her bed with her eyes and mouth open. She tried repeatedly to resuscitate her; police told Rodriguez her neighbor died on the way to the hospital. Her body temperature was 106 degrees.
``She didn't have nobody but the neighbors,'' Rodriguez said, her eyes swelling with tears. ``She was a very lonely person so I tried to look after her. There's a lot of lonely people out there.''
Walter Waiter, 81, lived on the second floor of a two-story frame home with peeling storm windows that were kept on year-round. His friend and poker partner, Fred R. Gunther, 89, lived downstairs.
Waiter's family was in Indiana, Gunther said, so ``he came down to my place all the time'' to play poker and drink a little beer.
Next-door neighbor Helen Navarro checked on the men frequently, but didn't see Waiter after mid-day Thursday. Ten minutes after a power failure Friday, she went to his apartment and found him dead on the floor in sweltering heat. Authorities said he probably died Thursday.
``It wasn't for a lack of power that he died, it was for not opening his windows,'' she said.
Staff writer Lisa Garcia contributed information to this story.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB