EDITORIAL Government Avoiding Responsibility Blaming People, Nature or God for Disasters Makes Next One Inevitable
- Natalie Frank
- Jul 18
- 7 min read
Whether it’s the Texas flood or the Chicago heat wave, making dangerous decisions before and refusing to accept responsibility after disasters makes them all the more deadly
Natalie C. Frank, Ph.D 7/18/2025
It was just the 30th anniversary of Chicago’s devastating heat wave of 1995 which cost an estimated 739 people their lives. This anniversary happens to fall during another particularly hot Chicago summer. Despite meteorologists attempts to warn city leaders and residents before the heat wave began that it was on its way, most responded, “It’s summer in Chicago. Of course it’s going to get hot. Get over it.”
The heat wave killed mostly the elderly and infirmed who resided in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago and were living without air conditioning. Fans did nothing but circulate the hot air. Many people tried to get relief by jumping into Lake Michigan or community pools, and hundreds of fire hydrants were illegally opened. Yet with heat consistently above 100 degrees, even those efforts ultimately failed to help many who subsequently died.
Wed. July 12th, temperatures rose to 97 degrees, hot but not unprecedented in Chicago. But the mercury would continue to rise over the next 5 days. On Thursday July 13th, by afternoon the temperature was recorded as 104 at O’Hare and 106 at Midway. However, factoring in humidity made it feel like 125, according to the heat index.
On Friday, July 14th as temperatures soared to 102 degrees at Midway, City Hall appeared largely out of touch with the escalating crisis. Making matters worse, approximately 10 overcrowded emergency rooms switched to “bypass” mode, refusing to accept additional patients. Meanwhile, on the North Side, up to 49,000 residents were left without power for much of the weekend after several Commonwealth Edison transformers failed, leaving air conditioners inoperable.
On Saturday, July 15th, the last official day of the Chicago heat wave, temperatures reached 98 but the high humidity level made the temperature feel like over 100. Late Saturday morning, health department officials issued a citywide heat emergency, prompting an immediate response. All 56 of the city’s ambulances and its 600 paramedics were soon fully deployed. The number of hospitals turning away new patients climbed to 16. Just four blocks from the old Cook County Hospital on West Harrison Street, a steady stream of police cars and ambulances arrived at the Cook County morgue, each one carrying two or more bodies.
While the Chicago heat wave broke on Sunday with the temperature at 93, 911 calls continued to come in and more bodies were discovered. While there were clearly things that could have been done to prevent the large loss of life, the city leadership continued to blame the tragedy on abnormal Chicago weather patterns that couldn’t have been predicted.
“Let’s be realistic,” Mayor Richard M. Daley said at a press conference as the death toll rose. “No one realized the deaths of that high an occurrence would take place.” A Chicago health department official added that “government can’t guarantee that there won’t be a heat wave.” Later, the heat wave was officially described by city leaders as a “unique meteorological event.”
Similar the Chicago heatwave disaster, in the aftermath of the devastating floods in Texas last week, officials at every level, from President Donald Trump to the Texas governor to local leaders, have worked to avoid blame and redirect attention away from their own accountability.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt referred to the disaster as “an act of God,” adding, “It’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did.” Governor Greg Abbott dismissed questions of responsibility, saying such concerns were for “losers.” Meanwhile, Trump told reporters, “Nobody expected it, nobody saw it.”
This way of attributing cause to such disasters is problematic. By suggesting that disasters are entirely acts of mother nature or God, event that can’t be predicted ahead of time, ensures a sense of complacency as opposed to a necessary urgency.
Elected officials charged with keeping their constituents safe are quick to attribute a disaster to anything other than themselves. Yet the reality is that in both the Chicago heatwave and the Texas flood there were things that could have been done to minimize harm.
First and foremost, recognizing that climate change will make extreme weather conditions worse and more frequent with each passing year has to be recognized. The Chicago heat wave and the Texas floods were not isolated events. Climate change will cause more drastic and sometimes violent changes in weather conditions as time goes on. Experts warn that we are already seeing devastating consequences of weather change in more frequent and more extreme weather patterns. These include:
Hurricanes and Tropical Cyclones: As temperatures rise, warmer oceans result in greater intensity, quicker intensification, and increased wind speeds. This leads to more damage and loss of life upon landfall.
Wildfires: Dry seasons being hotter and lasting longer along with earlier snowmelt, and stronger winds lead to conditions increasing the likelihood of fires which burn longer and spread more easily.
Floods: Increased evaporation and the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere from higher temperatures result in heavier rainfall and more devastating flooding events. This can be seen in both river and coastal flooding, worsened by rising sea levels.
Droughts: In some areas, climate change is resulting in more severe and longer lasting droughts as increased evaporation leads to drier conditions.
Heatwaves: Rising temperatures contribute directly to more frequent, longer lasting and more intense heatwaves, which result in significant health risks.
Tornadoes: Conditions that contribute to an increase in the frequency and intensity of severe thunderstorms can result in more powerful and destructive tornadoes.
Winter Storms: When the atmosphere warms up it is able to hold more moisture, leading to heavier snowfall when temperatures drop. Additionally, changes in Arctic weather patterns may contribute to extreme cold spells in some regions.
Places most likely to experience the devastating consequences of climate change need to have plans that can immediately be acted on as an extreme weather system is beginning and as the disaster is playing out. Measures such as creating more tornado shelters, warming centers where there are extreme winter storms, building levees, dams, seawalls, floodwalls and flood gates to contain water or move it away from vulnerable areas where flooding is common and for all areas that have potentially deadly weather patterns a warning system such as alarms and emergency signals on cell phones, radios and television are potential life savers.
Just because extreme weather may be a given in different parts of the country and cannot be altered by man doesn’t mean there is nothing that can be done to keep people safe when such weather and its consequences do occur. It’s a matter of accepting that climate change is the most dangerous inevitability that will cause weather patterns to become more extreme and devastating in the coming years.
In Chicago, there was the need for wellness teams who went door to door and checked on people in every neighborhood. While the South and West sides of the city were hit the hardest, there are people in the Northside that also have no air conditioning. Additionally, nearly 50,000 people on the Northside lost power during the hottest days of the heat wave and since the South and West sides experienced the biggest problems the area was largely ignored.
Chicago summers have been getting noticeably hotter since 1990. A study from Climate Central shows that Chicago, as well as many other cities, is experiencing rising summer temperatures due to climate change and urban heat island effects. Records going back over 150 years indicated that 2024, was Chicago's hottest year on record.
Meteorologists and climate change experts have warned Chicago and other cities of increasing summer temperatures in areas where temperatures during these months were already hot. City leaders were made aware of this trend and should have taken precautions to help the residents in ways similar to today, such as having cooling stations where people could go to get out of the heat, splash pads for kids (and adults when it is just that hot out), and regular wellness checks.
The Chicago City Council routinely approves large expenditures for all manner of requests. Some of the excess TIF money could be used to renovate neighborhoods to make them cooler by planting trees for shade, renovating houses to increase ventilation and air flow and providing at least one air conditioning unit per family. Had these measure been taking in time for the 1995 summer, the fatalities would have decreased significantly. But saying that extreme summer heat was a geographic inevitability that just had to be tolerated provided an excuse for city leaders to claim there is nothing that can be done.
In Texas there were inadequate Infrastructure and early warning systems. Despite a history of flooding, many communities across Texas remain ill-equipped to withstand increasingly severe storms. Contributing factors include insufficient stormwater drainage systems, aging or ineffective emergency communication networks, and limited investment in modern early warning technologies. These gaps continue to leave residents vulnerable, even in areas that have previously experienced significant flood events.
Policy choices and funding constraints also hindered Texas’ ability to prepare for such storms. Critics point to political decision-making as a key obstacle to effective disaster preparedness. Proposed budget cuts to federal agencies such as FEMA and the National Weather Service are seen by some as undermining national resilience efforts. At the same time, Texas municipalities often shoulder the primary responsibility for financing flood control and mitigation projects, despite frequently lacking the financial capacity to undertake large-scale infrastructure upgrades.
We need to expect our leaders to genuinely step up when it comes to disaster preparedness. Instead of just saying that damage is caused by forces beyond our control, leaders should be held responsible for the failures in planning and prevention. Labeling disasters as just “acts of God” can sometimes be a way to dodge responsibility, ignoring the risks that could have been managed or avoided with better decisions.
In the end, while natural events like storms or floods are part of nature, the real damage often depends on how humans respond, and sometimes, how we fail to respond. If we only focus on what we can’t control, we risk overlooking important issues like outdated infrastructure, poor emergency plans, and the way we choose to spend or save money. Effective prevention and response need us to acknowledge that good governance can play a big role in reducing, or possibly increasing, the harm caused by floods and other disasters. And we need to be vocal about these expectations and not simply expect worn out excuses.
