Heat waves receive little public attention not only because they fail to generate the massive property damage and fantastic images produced by other weather-related disasters, but also because their victims are primarily social outcasts--the elderly, the poor, and the isolated--from whom we customarily turn away.4 Silent and invisible killers of silenced and invisible people, the social conditions that make heat waves so deadly do not so much disappear from view as fail to register with newsmakers and their audiences--including social scientific experts on disasters.