Fierce dog days of summer

August in Chicago can bring on the heat — and the fury

Severe thunderstorms. Tornado touchdowns. Sweltering heat. The feverish weather this past week reminded us that the Chicago area is still in the thick of the dog days of summer. August is notorious for being sultry and tempestuous, even as climate disruption has made extreme weather and temperatures more the norm. As Tribune photographers have documented over the years, Chicagoans know how to tap into their resourcefulness to find relief when the air turns suffocating. Such as with an old-school spray-down from a fire hydrant. A soak in a kiddie pool for mother and child. A quick break inside an ice freezer. Or ingenuity in creating some extra shade.

As a stalwart school crossing guard told a Tribune reporter during an August hot spell in 1988, “You can dress for the winter, but you can’t dress for the summer.” A Chicagoan working on his car that day advised summoning the powers of the mind to get through the heat: “I believe in visualizing the cool breeze.”

When it comes to rain, August can bring feast or famine. An afternoon deluge on Aug. 7, 1942, caught the city by surprise and “knotted traffic, drenched thousands in the loop area and caused an involuntary black-out in the city hall and county building,” the Tribune reported. Hapless Chicago drivers got caught up in flooded underpasses.

Sometimes nature’s power turns stunningly destructive. August tornadoes have touched down in the Chicago area on numerous years, but one of the most memorable struck Aug. 28, 1990. A series of thunderstorms spawned a cluster of tornadoes as the system swept across Wisconsin and Illinois over five hours.

What became known as the Plainfield tornado killed at least 29 people and injured hundreds more as it “demolished subdivisions, collapsed a high school into a pile of bricks and tossed people from their homes into cornfields,” the Tribune wrote the day after. It was the first F-5 tornado, since the start of record-keeping in 1950, to strike Illinois during the month of August.

In one Plainfield subdivision, a teen boy testified to the aftermath he witnessed: “When we came up from the basement — the cars, the garage, everything — was gone. When we got up, there were no trees, no cars, no church, no grocery store where I used to work.”

But endurance prevails. Even when August delivers its worst. “The kids are smiling and we’re happy,” a tornado survivor said.

ARMANDO VILLA/CHICAGO TRIBUNE A man at Daley Center Plaza dons all the news that’s fit to wear to create a double shade against the fierce sun on Aug. 7, 1979. The temperature peaked at 92 degrees.

DON CASPER/CHICAGO TRIBUNE John Lee of the Lily Cache subdivision sits in his rocking chair on Aug. 29, 1990, and surveys damage done by the tornado that devastated Plainfield the day before.

PHIL GREER/CHICAGO TRIBUNE Becky Tomko and her 1-year-old daughter, Bethany, seek relief from the blistering heat in a pool on Aug. 3, 1988, in the Uptown neighborhood.

JAMES MAYO/CHICAGO TRIBUNE Children cool off in the spray from an open fire hydrant at Karlov and Maypole Avenues on Aug. 19, 1983, in Chicago.

PHIL GREER/CHICAGO TRIBUNE Jose Sanchez and Norma Zamarron have the playground at Throop Street and Chicago Avenue all to themselves on a rainy Aug. 10, 1988.