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Heat 2
Thu Jul 08, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. Today, correspondent Bob Henson
looks at why we might not take heat waves as seriously as we should.
BH: One of the most feared weapons in history was the neutron bomb. It threatened to
kill people but leave buildings standing. Heat waves may be the weather equivalent of
a neutron bomb. Sociologist and media expert Eric Klinenberg has studied the
Chicago heat wave of 1995, and he's thought about why it's so hard to make people
realize they're in danger from heat.
EK: Close your eyes for a moment and try to picture a hurricane or a tornado or a flood.
We can visualize those extreme weather events and understand very quickly the
dangers they pose.
EK: On the other hand if we close our eyes and picture a heat wave, it's hard to know
exactly what image will come up. Heat waves are very slow and gradual killers. They
tend to attack the body over a couple of days and so many people feel OK at the
beginning of a heat wave and only realize something is wrong when it's very late in the
process.
BH: Klinenberg says the heat waves just aren’t a dramatic draw on the six o’clock
news.
EK: It's clear that it's because heat disasters aren't as spectacular and camera ready
as these other weather systems, that we don't pay the kind of attention to them that we
should.
EK: The victims of heat waves are primarily the elderly, the isolated, and the poor
people living in cities. Those are people we typically don't cover in the media as well.
So it's an invisible disaster that kills largely invisible people. Perhaps that's the reason
we don't care enough about them.
Klinenberg’s book on the Chicago disaster is called "Heat Wave." The Weather
Notebook is supported by Subaru and the National Science Foundation.
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