Philly's method of county heat deaths met stiff resistance, but the city eventually was vindicated.
Officially, Philadelphia recorded 118 heat-related deaths in the summer of 1993, most of them among older people who lived alone. Unofficially, not everyone believed it.
And if the numbers were accurate, that would raise serious questions about an administration that had been in office just 18 months, Cohen said: People might well ask, “‘Why can’t the city take care of its aged population.’ ” Rendell sought answers from the Medical Examiner’s Office and the Health Department.
That summer, in an Inquirer interview, Mirchandani said that “on a typical day, we see 15 cases ... and if it suddenly jumps to 40 cases when the temperature is 100 degrees and we go out and see all the windows closed,” it was reasonable to conclude that heat was a factor in the excess deaths.“There was some legitimate questions,” Cohen added, “but we had what we thought what were really legitimate answers.
The tragedy in Chicago further affirmed Mirchandani’s methodology, said the weather service’s Iovino.“We are fortunate that Philadelphia did that in 1993,” said Eric Klinenberg, New York University sociology professor who wrote“People are aware of the dangers of heat waves in a way that they weren’t before.”
Klinenberg, a Chicago native and now a sociology professor at New York University, recalled that in 1995 he was living in Paris, where he read about the disaster in his hometown.
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