The Chicago heat wave of 1995, which went down in history as an embarrassment to the existing governmental and social structures, exposed underlying problems in an unexpected way. The data summarizing the damage and death tolls of the environmental rarity held valuable information to sociologists. As the article states, “The processes that killed so many city residents were concentrated around the low-income, elderly, African-American. and more violent regions of the metropolis, the neighborhoods of exclusion in which the most vulnerable Chicagoans make their homes. “When analyzed, the information shows how the heat wave unevenly affected Chicago’s residents. One of the major keys for a community’s success in the heat wave was the strength of social ties and networks. The article illuminates the Latino community’s strong ethnic ties, unlike that of the African American communities and the affect these networks had on each community’s survival. In a similar way to New York immigrants, these Chicagoans depended on enclaves for mutual support and aide when it came to immediate needs and dependence on organizations for help obtaining governmental aide as well. These observations were not initially made in the reports of the heat wave: sociologists had to approach the information from several angles to determine unrevealed explanations for the high rates of disaster.