Heat leads to evacuation of nursing home

Seventy-six residents of a Buffalo Grove nursing home had to be evacuated Tuesday after high heat caused by a storm-induced power outage that began Monday night threatened their safety.

Officials responded to a call at 11 a.m. from Sunrise Assisted Living community, worried that rising temperatures from the prolonged outage were endangering residents, said Buffalo Grove Battalion Chief Larry Swieca.

Two hours later, the Buffalo Grove fire and police departments and ambulances from the area began to evacuate residents of Sunrise. The Community Emergency Response Team helped with the effort.

It did not matter that half an hour later, ComEd recharged the fuse that lightning had struck the night before, returning power to the building and, most importantly, its cooling system.

"It's not like the air conditioning you have in your home; they have these chilling towers where they chill water down," said Buffalo Grove fire Lt. John Gilleran said.

The water in those units takes a long time to get to a temperature where it can cool the air again, he said. The process could take 12 to 16 hours, which meant Sunrise's seniors needed an alternative dwelling for the approaching night.

Some seniors with relatives living nearby went home with their families. In the nearly four-hour evacuation process, many Sunrise residents were moved to a cooling station set up inside Meridian Middle School.

Tuesday evening, officials still were determining where to house people for the night.

"We have a collaborative health care urgency group working on getting everyone placed for the night," Gilleran said.

Claremont and Brighton Place, nearby nursing homes, and Laidlaw bus company offered their help.

The nursing home wasn't the only location suffering from the power outages.

High winds and lightning from Monday night's scattered thunderstorms generated a series of complaints to ComEd.

By Tuesday evening, 559 ComEd customers in northwest Cook County still were without power, a spokesman said. The company said it has no control over weather and that some areas get harder hit by storms than others.

But that explanation didn't mute the anger.

"When you hear them say things like that, you know they don't care about you," said Elk Grove Village resident Jerry Smith. "I haven't had full power or air conditioning for 14 hours now, and ComEd keeps telling us different stories about what's going on."