Effect On The Environment
As many as 5,000 heat related deaths were reported. Many people suffered from heat stroke and heat exhaustion, particularly the elderly. Unlike today, air conditioning was in the early stages of development and was therefore absent from houses and commercial buildings. Many of the deaths occurred in high population density areas of Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toronto and other urban areas. Farmers across the continent saw crop failure, causing corn and wheat prices to rise quickly. Droughts and heat waves were common in the 1930s. The 1930s are remembered as the driest and warmest decade for the US (the Dust Bowl years) and the summer of 1936 was the most widespread and destructive heat wave to occur in the Americas in centuries.
Read more about this topic: 1936 North American Heat Wave
Famous quotes containing the words effect and/or environment:
“Nothing could his enemies do but it rebounded to his infinite advantage,—that is, to the advantage of his cause.... No theatrical manager could have arranged things so wisely to give effect to his behavior and words. And who, think you, was the manager? Who placed the slave-woman and her child, whom he stooped to kiss for a symbol, between his prison and the gallows?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)