Hot Town, Summer in the City

By Rachelle Bowden in News on Jul 25, 2005 7:15PM

Did you have electricity yesterday? That's what Chicagoist has been asking all of our cubemates. Because yesterday we came home at 4pm and had nothing! We tried to make the best of it .. went out to eat.. came back and politely called ComcastEd at 8:30 pm. They told us that the estimated time to restore power was between 7:30-8, which had obviously passed. We played Jenga by candlelight and layed around talking a lot. We could see and hear the ComcastEd trucks outside so we knew the power would be up soon. At 10pm the power came on long enough for us to see that the news was reporting outages in Indiana, but then the juice went off and didn't come back on until about 1:30 am.

Of course, this outage was caused by the extreme fucking heat yesterday. Yesterday was the hottest day recorded in the past decade of hot Chicago summers. The temperature hit 104 degrees, which is only 1 degree cooler than the highest temperature ever recorded in the city. It was so hot that a short walk outside left us swimming in sweat. And so hot that sadly, 3 people died of heat related causes. If you know someone who lives alone, especially elderly or sick people, take them into your cool house, or get them to an area cooling center. We're also fans of going to the movies and going to bars to beat the heat.

So, hang in there hot & crabby people, relief is in sight. Tomorrow's high is only supposed to be 84 and Wednesday's prediction is a chilly 78. In the meantime, learn about How Sweat Works.

Image via How Stuff Works