Solving Environmental Problems through Engineering

Introduction

A total of 739 people died over seven days, all for the same exact reason. Can you take a guess why? Could it be a deadly virus outbreak? No. Was it just excessive violence in the community? Again, no. Was it a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a series of tornadoes? Not that either. “It was a natural disaster, that revealed an unnatural one,” as Judith Helfand coins it.¹ In July of 1995, the most traumatic heatwave in the history of the United States came knocking on the doors of Chicago, Illinois. The daily average temperature for that week: 104°F, a devastating 20°F above the average temperature for July.² All tolled, 739 people perished tragically, dying of heat-related deaths.

According to Dr. Steve Whitman, the Director of Epidemiology of Chicago from 1990-2000, people die from the heat for 2 reasons. “If you have a pre-existing condition, so it’s already weakened your body, then clearly it’s going to be easier for the heat to kill you. The second, and intimately related factor, is that people aren’t able to defend themselves against the heat. That defense can be in terms of opening their windows, and in poor vulnerable communities people don’t want to open their windows. It could be by turning on the air conditioner, and in vulnerable communities people don’t have air conditioning. It could also be going outside their house and going to an institution where there is air conditioning. For example, a public library might have air conditioning, or even the lobby of an apartment house might have air conditioning. Vulnerable communities tend not to have those as well.³” Chicago, a city like many other cities across the country that suffers from the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, had an African-American population in 1995 that was affected at an alarmingly disproportionate rate. African Americans (.3 per 100,000) and Native/Indigenous Peoples (.6 per 100,000) are dying from heat-related illnesses at a higher rate than their White (.2 per 100,000) counterparts.⁴ This rings true in many communities in America, due to a long-history of racially discriminatory government practices, including my students’ city of Richmond, Virginia.