That Killing High Hangs On

Mercury over 100DEG F, death toll over 1,000

After visiting relatives down South, Lula Fields, 43, was driving home to Michigan with her husband when she appeared to doze off near Jackson, Tenn. He stopped their car to rouse her, but failed: she had died, soundlessly, of a heat stroke caused by the 100DEG F weather. In Atlanta, Willie Jones, 52, was discovered prostrate on the floor of his hot, airless apartment; half an hour after doctors packed him in ice, he was still unconscious, with an almost unheard-of body temperature of 116DEG. In Webster Groves, Mo., Jeneva Goins found her sister Maggie Turner, 65, dead at her dining-room table--yet another victim of the nation's spreading early summer heat wave.

By week's end the triple-digit temperatures that first appeared in the Sunbelt late in June had directly or indirectly caused the death of more than 1,000 people in a triangle of 20 states from Texas to New York and the Dakotas. Dallas, where temperatures have risen as high as 113DEG, has had 25 consecutive days of 100DEG-plus weather; Little Rock has had 17 such days. So serious has been the resulting human suffering that President Carter funneled $6.7 million in aid to the six hardest-hit states--Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas and Louisiana--to help low-income people pay for fans, air conditioners and the cost of running them, and to provide transportation to relief centers.

Heat is a silent killer. As a person's temperature rises into a range of 104DEG to 106DEG, the brain swells and thinking becomes fuzzy. Gradually, the body becomes dehydrated, losing important electrolytes and the ability to cool itself. Then the blood flows sluggishly, and kidneys and other major organs begin shutting down; eventually the victim sinks into a coma and is susceptible to cardiac arrest.

Since elderly people are particularly prone to such comas, the heat wave's human toll has been highest in Missouri, where the proportion of over-65 citizens is above 22% in some areas, double the national average. As of last week, the state had tallied more than 230 temperature-related deaths. In sweltering St. Louis, calls for ambulances rose to 350 a day, almost double the normal level. Many of the city's elderly, explained Health Commissioner Helen Bruce, "live in areas they consider dangerous, so they have nailed their windows down and keep their doors locked." During the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, St. Louis residents beat the heat by sleeping in parks or along the Mississippi river front. Today, says one police officer, "you'd have to sleep with a shotgun."

Missouri Governor Joseph Teasdale requested utility companies not to shut off service to any delinquent customers during the heat emergency and called out the National Guard to transport heat patients and cooling equipment.

As the high temperatures persisted, Lionel Anderson, a St. Louis bus driver, began passing out cups of ice water to his passengers. When a carriage horse collapsed on a street in New Orleans' French Quarter, tourists pulled off their shirts, drenched them in water, and tried to revive the fallen animal. In San Antonio, Roman Catholic Archbishop Patrick Flores asked priests in his 32-county jurisdiction to lead prayers for rain at Sunday Masses. Worshipers at the nondenominational Community Church of Our Lord in Austin had special cause to pray for tempered temperatures: someone stole the big air conditioner from the Rev. Bill Spivey's sanctuary.

The economic consequences of the heat wave are only beginning to be registered. In Arkansas, hundreds of sections of highways have buckled and melted under the sun. Estimated repair cost: $8 million. So far, Texas farmers have lost about $1 billion in cotton, corn and sorghum crops. Ranchers from Fort Worth to Fargo, N. Dak., have been forced by scorched grazing lands and dried-up stock ponds to send their herds to the auction barn ahead of schedule. Inevitably food prices, whose relative stability has been one of the bright spots in the nation's dismal inflation picture, are bound to shoot up as a result of the rising temperatures.

The cause of all the exceptional heat, a broad high-pressure system hovering over the middle part of the country, was showing little sign of moving on. As a result, there was every possibility that what was already established as the worst drought that many areas of the U.S. had experienced in 25 years would continue to exact a heavy toll. qed

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