Our Summer Vacation: 20,000 Dead

Europe's long, hot, tragic summer begs a little North American background.

In July 1995, the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago was an accomplice in the murder of more than 700 of its senior citizens. As temperatures climbed above 40C (104F), the city's airless tenements and skid-row hotels became charnel houses. Thousands of the poor and elderly, mainly blacks, were mortally stricken.

By the second day of the heat wave, overcrowded hospitals were closing their doors to the critically ill and paramedics were unable to respond to the deluge of emergency calls. Medical workers warned of a death epidemic and begged for help.

But the Daley Jr. machine bunkered itself in denial and inaction. Heat mortality among the forgotten poor received less attention than had winter snow days, which caused few deaths but greatly inconvenienced suburban commuters and Loop businesses. Thus, the fire department refused to call in more staff or ambulances, while the police ignored requests to canvass the tenements for isolated seniors.

City hall stonewalled the media: "What disaster?" As bodies overflowed the morgue, the Mayor complained to reporters. "It's hot. But let's not blow it out of proportion... Every day people die of natural causes."

The Chicago "heat catastrophe," as it is now officially called, was of course anything but a "natural" disaster. As radical sociologist Eric Klinenberg explains in a brilliant book published last year (Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago), "These deaths were not an act of God." He demonstrates instead that they were the preventable consequences of poverty, racism, social isolation, and criminal civic negligence.

Klinenberg's approach is generally shared by public health analysts. Indeed, the lessons of Chicago 1995 were enshrined in authoritative studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and the New England Journal of Medicine .

An Avoidable Massacre

These reports, whose findings have now been widely adopted in North American cities, advocate early warning systems, the immediate opening of neighborhood "cooling centers," door-to-door searches for ill seniors, adequate summer staffing of hospitals, and the subsidizing of air-conditioning in low-income apartments.

This literature is now scientifically canonical, easily accessible on the internet, and well known to European professionals. The lesson of the Chicago heat wave, in other words, screams from the bookshelf. There was no excuse for not heeding it.

Yet this August, the vulnerable poor were again massacred under analogous social conditions by Chicago-like responses. In France, for example, the rightwing health minister Jean-Francois Mattei continued his vacation -- 'tennis, anyone?' -- while thousands of his fellow citizens perished. Heroic lethargy was also the response of the Berlusconi government in Italy, which lied to the press and suppressed heat-death statistics.

The overall European death toll is probably the equivalent to five or more World Trade Centers: at least 20,000 victims and probably more. Official estimates are at least 11,400 in France; more than 4000 in Italy; 1400 in the Netherlands; 1300 in Portugal; and some 900 in the United Kingdom. The Spanish figure of only 100 is hardly credible and should be the stuff of scandal.

While the Euro-right blames the 35-hour-week and the collapse of family values for these atrocities, the Left must be relentless in holding neo-liberal policies accountable. Socialists must demand the kind of 'social autopsy' -- of which Klinenberg's study provides an admirable model -- that lays bare the causative roles of poverty, unaffordable housing, and underfunded public services, as well as the collapse of intergenerational solidarity.