Mercury over 100° 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 100° 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 116°. 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 113°, has had 25 consecutive days of 100°-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 104° to 106°, 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.