1. While reading Klinenberg’s “Denaturalizing disaster” something that struck me was how hopeless it would have been for certain age and ethnic groups in Chicago. They had never been helped before by the city, and thus when they needed help, they didn’t respond and even more disparaging they weren’t offered anything close to the level of assistance they needed. I think that Klinenberg had a really good way of showing this, by describing the police inaction which led to many elderly African American deaths during the heat wave. This also ties in very closely with how one would look at what happened to the large amount of elderly living in walk-ups in Chinatown during Sandy. One would hope that any deaths that occurred during that time were not under the same circumstances as in Chicago.

2. During class, something that I found interesting was the idea that women connect people to one another. We discussed how in the Latino communities in Chicago, where less deaths occurred than in the non-Latino black communities, there may have been more women to get the word out and to help out those who may otherwise have been stuck in their apartments like the non-Latino black elderly. This brought us to a discussion about looking at gender, class, and race closely when making or looking at statistical data, which I think is obviously very important when coming to any conclusions about these descriptors and their effects on what happened.