Denaturalizing disaster: A social autopsy of the 1995 Chicago heat wave ERIC KLINENBERG University of California, Berkeley It's hot. It's very hot.We all have our little problems but let's not blow it out of proportion .... We go to extremes in Chicago. And that's why people like Chicago. We go to extremes. Chicago Mayor, Richard M. Daley During my residence in England, at least twenty or thirty persons have died of simple starvation under the most revolting circumstances, and a jury has rarely been found possessed of the courage to speak the truth in the matter .... The bourgeoisie dare not speak the truth in these cases, for it would speak its own condemnation .... The English working men call this social murder, and accuse our whole society of perpetrating this crime perpetually. Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England On June 30, 1995, the front page of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a journal of the Centers for Disease Control and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, featured a report attribut- ing 5,379 American deaths in the thirteen years between 1979 and 1992 to excessive heat. Deaths from the heat, the journal concluded, ``are readily preventable.'' Public health experts know the risk factors asso- ciated with heat related illness and mortality as well as the procedures responsible parties can take to reduce them. The report lists this in- formation and advises local o¤cials to use it when conditions warrant intervention. 1 Less than two weeks later an unusual weather system hit Chicago with one of the most severe heat waves in its recorded history. Temperatures Theory and Society 28: 239^295, 1999. ß 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.