Mary Ann Koranek was too small and her cousin, Joseph O'Brien, too weak with arthritis to haul their air conditioner upstairs from the basement on a sweltering July day.
When Koranek returned home from an errand, 58-year-old O'Brien was dead. "It happened so fast," Koranek said.O'Brien was among the first casualties of the 1995 heat wave that killed more than 700 people in Chicago by many estimates.
The heat wave became the second-deadliest disaster in Chicago history and prompted the city to keep better tabs on the elderly and other isolated residents who succumbed.
The heat wave taught the city an important lesson - "that creating a sense of a community isn't just a nice thing, it's a critical thing. People have to depend on each other," said Lisa Boulden, a spokeswoman for Mayor Richard Daley.
On July 13, 1995, temperatures soared to 106 in Chicago and the humidity made it feel more like 125. The stifling heat lasted nearly a week and was blamed for more than 1,000 deaths across the East and Midwest.
But no city suffered like Chicago, where bodies overflowed from morgues into refrigerated trucks and residents more suited to wind and sub-zero cold fended without fans or air conditioners.
Like O'Brien, many of those who died were frail, frightened or alone. Some died behind boarded windows, their fear of intruders contributing to their demise. Others succumbed when no one came to check on them.
After hundreds had died, Chicago officials instituted a heat emergency plan. When the heat index reaches 90 for three days, phone banks go to work, calling residents at risk and taking them, if necessary, to air-conditioned relief centers.
The city also recruited volunteers to keep in contact with frail people who live alone and are suspicious of strangers.
Daley's office was criticized for being slow to react. In turn, his administration cast doubt on the body counts provided by Cook County Medical Examiner Edmund Donoghue, who included deaths in which heat was a factor, not the sole cause.
Donoghue was prepared to defend his figures after watching the controversy that erupted over heat-death calculations in Philadelphia, which reported 118 heat-related deaths in 1993.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention upheld Philadelphia's count and later upheld Donoghue's.
Steven Whitman, the Chicago Department of Health's director of epidemiology, tallied deaths two ways: those certified by Dono-ghue's office as heat-related and those in excess of the number of expected deaths. He counted 726 deaths, about 200 more than were officially certified as heat-related.
Whitman's review of decades-old death statistics uncovered a surprising fact: Four decades earlier, a Chicago heat wave in July and August killed 885 people.
A check of newspaper archives found no evidence that residents realized such a tragedy was taking place. "It must have happened very gradually and people must not have noticed," Whitman said.
The pain remains very real for Koranek, who keeps O'Brien's driver's license picture propped on his old dresser. "I blame myself" for leaving the house that day, she said, eyes brimming.
The pair would regularly drive to the cemetery on Sundays to visit family graves. Koranek will visit the cemetery alone on Sunday - the one-year anniversary of O'Brien's death.
"I miss him horribly," she said.