MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

When Voncile Shipps got home from work two Thursdays ago, she noted the usual evidence that it was a scorcher. There was no water pressure in her brick flat on Chicago's South Side, since the local kids had opened the fire hydrants. There was some water in a kettle, though, which she cooled with ice and gave to her bedridden son David, 41. "He seemed fine," Shipps says, so she went out to a gathering at her church. When she returned, David was not fine. "His voice had changed," she says; he was too weak to hold a glass. Shipps called 911 but learned that ambulances were booked for two hours. A private service told her the same thing, so she got David into a car and ran red lights to a hospital. There, an exhausted doctor informed her that her son had been dead an hour and a half. "That was a lie," says Shipps angrily. "He could have been saved if the ambulance had come out in time. I've been in this city paying taxes long enough to get better than this."

Can 457 people die suddenly in an American metropolis, with no one to blame for it but God? That was the question Chicago faced last week as the official count of heat-related deaths from the previous, hellish weekend mounted and settled by Friday at a mortality figure more than seven times that of the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake. Most of the victims were over 60. Many were sick already; quite a few were reclusive; and in the words of Cook County medical examiner Edmund R. Donoghue, "[Many] were probably very near death and their date of death was just moved up by the heat." But that was small solace to survivors. As the corpses piled up, so did bitter recriminations against the administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley.

Daley brought some of the vituperation down on himself through sheer lack of tact. On Friday the mayor admonished reporters, "We all have our little problems; let's not blow it out of proportion." He joked that people loved Chicago because of its extremes, weather included. The remark seemed macabre days later, as hospitals grew overloaded and emergency vehicles delivered so many bodies to the Cook County morgue that the overflow had to be stored in seven refrigerated trucks.

And it was not long before outraged citizens made their replies to the mayor. The city's "Heat Plan," they discovered, although just 1 1/2 pages long, included provisions that allow the city to declare a state of emergency and so mobilize its entire police, fire and paramedic forces -- provisions that Daley invoked only tardily. Republican state senator Robert Raica, who is a paramedic, called for hearings on the inadequate ambulance service. Jennifer Neary, head of a group called Metro Seniors in Action, noting that the city had gone to the trouble of setting up "cooling centers," asked why a recently reconstituted police Senior Citizens Unit had failed to visit many elderly shut-ins and transport them to safety. "We are truly disgusted,'' she said.

Instead of soothing his constituents with comforting words, Daley spread blame. He criticized Commonwealth Edison, whose partial blackout deprived 41,000 residents of the city's North Side of air conditioning over the weekend. (This proved off the point: there were far more deaths on the South Side.) He questioned coroner Donoghue's death count, implying that by Donoghue's standards, "everybody in the summer that dies will die of heat." (Another red herring: Donoghue's calculation, which includes people who died of unknown natural causes in extraordinarily hot apartments, is the same as that used in many large cities.) Daley's pugnaciousness was outdone only by that of his commissioner of human services, Daniel Alvarez. "We are talking about people that died because they neglected themselves,'' he said of some of the victims. "These are people who don't read the newspapers, who don't watch TV. We did everything possible." Alvarez later apologized for his remarks.

Appropriately so, because in many cases, the victims' main sin was being old and poor. The weekend's most crushing revelation was that many people in tough neighborhoods died in sweltering apartments because they feared that opening a window might invite robbery. Yet Alvarez's analysis did have a grain of truth. Some anecdotes suggest that other victims were elderly shut-ins with disabilities who didn't hear or heed the weather warnings. Still others had air conditioners but declined, sometimes out of habit, to use them. Reaching such a population is laborious and appears to require more planning than Chicago, known more for snow than for heatstroke, thought to apply.

Unfortunately, only harsh experience appears to be the mother of municipal heat policy. On Thursday, Daley announced a revision of the Heat Plan featuring a three-part citizen-alert system that runs from "heat watch," through "heat warning" to "heat emergency.'' The new plan, which includes setting up phone banks and special rescue squads to reach senior citizens, borrows from ones in place in St. Louis and Philadelphia. Not that these cities deserve credit for special prescience: St. Louis lost 135 people to a heat wave in 1980, and Philly saw its own deadly summer (114 lost) in 1993.

--Reported by James L. Graff/Chicago

With reporting by JAMES L. GRAFF/CHICAGO