More about the 1911 heatwave

Thursday, July 19, 2012

We’ve had heat waves before

A newspaper item said that City Hall was ‘the coolest place in town.’

So you think this week has been hot. Be happy that you weren’t around in 1911 and 1921. Those summers had a misery index far beyond anything today. The sweltering heat waves of 1911 and 1921 hit Worcester County and the whole Northeast like a sledgehammer. And there were no air conditioners, no refrigerators and hardly any electric fans to ease the sweltering.

In July 1911, at least 500 Worcester County residents died of heat prostration and sunstroke. More than 600 horses dropped dead on the streets of New York City that summer. On July 12, a traveler from Southbridge to Worcester counted 20 dead horses on the way. Big plants like the Worcester Corset Co. and Whittall Carpets closed their doors when the thermometer several times hit 105.

The deaths in New England from the July heat have been estimated at more than 2,000, but no one really knows. It may have been twice that.

For those first sweltering weeks, people dropped like flies on Worcester streets and in Worcester factories. Police Chief David A. Matthews hired a motorized vehicle to transport the stricken to hospitals after the horse-drawn ambulances failed to keep up with the numbers of prostrate bodies on the streets and inside the factories.

“The ambulance horses are all in,” reported the Gazette.

The misery in 1911 began on July 1, when a torrid blast from the South turned the Northeast into an oven. We can only surmise what it must have been like on the second and third floors of the city’s many three-deckers. Or in the forging shops of Wyman-Gordon or American Steel and Wire with their blast furnaces and vats of molten iron.

There was no air conditioning, no electric refrigerators, no backyard pools. The only coolant was blocks of ice brought by ice wagons. Did the ice industry take advantage of the hot weather? A few years before, the Gazette had launched a crusade against the greedy “Ice Barons.” The 1911 heat wave probably didn’t improve feelings. Children followed the ice wagons along the broiling streets, hoping for a stray ice chip to suck on.

People headed en masse for the water — Coes Pond, Lake Quinsigamond, Indian Lake, wherever. The list of drownings around the county increased steadily. One man was reported to have committed suicide in Indian Lake.

One new development caught the attention of some. A few days after the heat hit, the Telegram published an advertisement from the Worcester Electric Light Co.: “Too hot to work? Not if you have the comfortable breezes of an ELECTRIC FAN blowing on you.” Not all houses had electricity and few had the means to install the new device. But City Hall had several, and conditions there were tolerable. A newspaper item said that City Hall was “the coolest place in town.”

By the second week, Mayor James Logan issued orders that any street department worker who felt done in by the heat could go home. Many did. Some companies shut down at noon and sent their workers home.

Telephone service was interrupted. The Gazette reported that only eight of the 25 operators were still on the job at phone headquarters. Those eight were being attended to by three doctors.

The newspaper also reported that some victims were “delirious with the heat.”

On July 9, the Telegram reported that 16 people in the city had died in one day. One of them was Horace Bigelow, creator of White City, the Rink at Bigelow Gardens, and other entertainments for the masses. The cause was listed as “old age,” but the steamy heat was hard on the elderly and the frail.

Hundreds of people slept outdoors on the Common and elsewhere.

The Gazette tried to be helpful. An editorial advised: “There is nothing to do but grin and bear it as cheerfully as possible and mitigate the dangers as much as may be by keeping out of the sun’s glare, refusing to rush about and becoming overheated …”

The heat wave broke on July 13 and things gradually returned to normal. No one knows just how many perished during those two steaming weeks, but it was a long time before Worcester County and the Northeast forgot the inferno of July 1911.

Things went along normally for the next decade. But the summer of 1921 brought another scorcher that was even more extensive. A Telegram headline announced “EARTH HEATWAVE BAFFLES SAVANTS” and went on to report in a subhead an alarming situation: “Temperature Far Above Normalcy For Nine Months While Droughts Reign and Volcanoes Rage.”

That heat wave hit in October. A press release from the Weather Bureau in Washington described a “world-wide heat wave of unusual strength and intensity” that may have been responsible for the recent “earthquakes, typhoons, tidal waves, cloud bursts, water spouts, hailstorms, floods and hurricanes.” The bureau noted that average temperatures were running 6.2 degrees higher than normal in New York City.

Today we know a lot more about weather phenomena than was known 90 and 100 years ago. But our Earth, a ball with a molten interior, still conceals some of its mysteries as it goes spinning through space in its 584-million-mile annual journey around the sun.

It probably has more surprises in store for us and our descendants.

Albert B. Southwick’s column appears regularly in the Telegram & Gazette.