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| History
of Operation Weather Survival in St. Louis |
| St. Louis experienced a heat wave in July, 1980. It was the first real prolonged period of extreme heat for the metropolitan area since 1966 when 246 individuals were reported as heat deaths. The heat began around the 4th of July. By the 12th, it was apparent that there was a very real crisis in the City of St. Louis. Emergency Medical Services (EMS) crews were finding dead or very ill persons in many areas of the City. Most were elderly persons living alone and many had been dead for several days before being discovered. City officials recommended to Mayor Vincent C. Schoemehl, Jr., that a heat emergency be declared. The Governor mobilized the National Guard and sent it to St. Louis to search door-to-door for victims. The Army Reserve supplied portable air-conditioning to non-air-conditioned parts of City Hospital. The American Red Cross opened emergency shelters. |
| In August, a team of researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control were sent to St. Louis and Kansas City, Missouri, to find out why, when the July 1980 heat wave affected a quarter of the country ( the southeast), the death rates were excessively high in these two cities. A case-control study outlined the reasons found and the risk factors for heat illness and death in two articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in June, 1982. |
| Early in 1981, City officials and representatives began meeting to form an organization to prevent the crisis of 1980 from happening again. The first community-wide meeting was organized by Harriet Woods in December l981 after an announced cut in federal energy assistance funds. This was the beginning of Operation Weather Survival (OWS). |
| At the same time, the St. Louis City Department of Health and Hospitals put together a heat illness prevention plan, titled "The Lion in Summer," that included a slide/sound show and speakers (health educators and EMS personnel) that was marketed to community and senior citizens' groups throughout the summer of l981 and again in 1982. The guiding force behind this plan was George E. Wettach, MD, Medical Director for the St. Louis EMS. Heat and cold illnesses were also made reportable, first by the St. Louis City Health Commissioner Helen Bruce, MD, and eventually by the Missouri Department of Health. |
| By 1982, health officials in the City of St. Louis and St. Louis County had developed a joint plan to monitor summer temperatures that would quickly warn citizens of anticipated periods of excessive heat. This was done through the Wet Bulb Glove Temperature that was used in St. Louis until 1997 when the protocol was changed at the request of the National Weather Service (NWS) to reflect the terminology used across the nation by the NWS. |
| OWS began as a formal contract in 1982 between the City and several social service agencies to provide necessary assistance during periods of extreme heat or cold. It eventually became a broad group of public health, government, human service, utilities, and for-profit companies and agencies that worked together to prevent illness or death from either extreme heat or cold. In l996, a more formal structure was initiated to assure the continuation of the organization because of many changes in the community and a drop in attendance at meetings. OWS is staffed by the United Way and now includes all the major counties in Missouri and Illinois that are considered part of the Metropolitan St. Louis area. |
| St. Louis experienced additional heat waves in l993, 1988 and in 1995 without again experiencing death rates close to the total of 113 in 1980. The major frustrations of the ongoing heat illness prevention program are, first, reaching the truly isolated elderly, high risk person who has no meaningful interaction with anyone, and second, convincing many seniors that they are at risk and that air-conditioning will save lives. |
| The major programs of heat illness prevention through OWS, in addition to the monitoring, warning, education and data collection system of the Health departments, are: |
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| St. Louis assisted Chicago in l995 when they were caught unaware, as St. Louis was in 1980. A Chicago TV station reported on national TV in l995 that St. Louis citizens were much more aware of the dangers of heat than were their counterparts in Chicago. Representatives from the St. Louis and Missouri Health Departments also were invited speakers at a national forum at National Weather Service headquarters in Maryland in the fall of 1996. |
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