CHICAGO: MORE HEAT THAN LIGHT

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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.