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Book: Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago
Quotes of Book: Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of
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  1. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    We were making some progress on climate-change adaptation in the late 1990s," Klaus Jacob observed. "But September 11th set us back a decade on extreme-weather hazards, because we started focusing on a completely different set of threats.
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  2. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    recent decades, American utility companies have spent relatively little on research and development. One industry report estimates that, in 2009, research-and-development investments made by all US electrical-power utilities amounted to at most $700 million, compared with $6.3 billion by IBM and $9.1 billion by Pfizer. In 2009, however, the Department of Energy issued $3.4 billion in stimulus grants to a hundred smart-grid projects across the United States, including many in areas that are prone to heat waves and hurricanes.
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  3. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    The 1995 heat wave was a social drama that played out and made visible a series of conditions that are always present but difficult to perceive. Investigating the people, places, and institutions most affected by the heat wave-the homes of the decedents, the neighborhoods and buildings where death was concentrated or prevented, the city agencies that forged an emergency response system, the Medical Examiners Office and scientific research centers that searched for causes of death, and the newsrooms where reporters and editors symbolically reconstructed the event-
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  4. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    The boys were already dead, though, and when the paramedics arrived, they determined that the body temperatures were 107 and 108 degrees.
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  5. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    The disaster also has a social etiology, which no meteorological study, medical autopsy, or epidemiological report can uncover. The human dimensions of the catastrophe remain unexplored. This book is organized around a social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave. Just as the medical autopsy opens the body to determine the proximate physiological causes of mortality, this inquiry aims to examine the social organs of the city and identify the conditions that contributed to the deaths of so many Chicago residents that July. If the idea of conducting a social autopsy sounds peculiar, this is largely because modern political and medical institutions have attained monopolistic roles in officially explaining, defining, and classifying life and death, in establishing the terms and categories that structure the way we see and do not see the world.
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  6. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    They determined that the death count based solely on the medical autopsies had underestimated the damage. Between 14 and 20 July, 739 more Chicago residents died than in a typical week for that month. In fact, public health scholars have established that the proportional death toll from the heat wave in Chicago has no equal in the record of U.S. heat disasters.
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  7. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    quite often happens that a phenomenon is insignificant only because one fails to take it into account."4 The missing dimension in our current understanding of the heat wave stems precisely from this kind of diagnostic failure.
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  8. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    More than one thousand people in excess of the July norm were admitted to inpatient units in local hospitals because of heatstroke, dehydration, heat exhaustion, renal failure, and electrolytic imbalances. Those who developed heatstroke suffered permanent damage, such as loss of independent function and multisystem organ failures. Thousands of other stricken by heat-related illnesses were treated in emergency rooms.
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  9. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    It's like an assembly line in there," one officer said. In many cases police delivered decomposed bodies to the morgue several days after the date of death because no one had noticed that the person had not been seen in awhile. It was impossible to know how many more victims remained in their homes, undiscovered. By Saturday the number of bodies coming in to the morgue exceeded its 222-bay holding capacity by hundreds. Incoming bodies were scattered around the office, and many of the examined corpses remained unclaimed because there were no next of kin. The owner of a local meat-packing firm volunteered to bring his fleet of refrigerated trucks to the morgue for storing the excess bodies. The first group of red and yellow vehicles, each about forty-eight feet long, arrived on Friday, but they filled up quickly and dozens of bodies remained.
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  10. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    In one major U.S. city, The New York Times reports, unclaimed bodies "are piling up faster than the city can handle them"; boxes containing the personal papers of the deceased are "piled floor to ceiling" in the county office.22 "We had never been so busy before," one Cook County investigator explained, "but nothing about the heat wave was really unusual except the amounts" {see fig
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  11. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    But together they will represent the range of positions and the diversity of viewpoints that constitute the heterogeneity of the modern city and account for the variations in the ways that the heat wave was managed and interpreted.
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  12. Eric Klinenberg _ Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of

    Heat waves receive little public attention not only because they fail to generate the massive property damage and fantastic images produced by other weather-related disasters, but also because their victims are primarily social outcasts-the elderly, the poor, and the isolated-from whom we customarily turn away.4 Silent and invisible killers of silenced and invisible people, the social conditions that make heat waves so deadly do not so much disappear from view as fail to register with newsmakers and their audiences-including social scientific experts on disasters.
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