It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region, and investigate, report, explore, from WBEZ.

Hey, I'm reporter Monica Eng.

Curious citizen, Ed Corcoran, has been hearing a lot about natural disasters lately.

The wildfires in the West, the risk of earthquakes in Los Angeles and San Francisco,

the hurricanes that hit recently in Houston and in Florida and Puerto Rico,

just seeing all that happen in the world and thinking, you know,

all that hasn't really happened in Chicago, what can get us?

So he asked Curious City if Chicago is vulnerable

to any kinds of natural disasters. Bad knows tornadoes can happen here. We sometimes get huge

snowstorms. And he wonders about another factor. Yeah, I'm definitely interested in finding

out how climate change can affect these things. I mean, the hurricanes that have been hitting, that seems to be made for us by climate change.

So I'm wondering, how will that change?

As climate change is Chicago's climate, are we going to have hotter summers and colder winters?

Are we going to have warmer winters?

Are we going to have more or less than apocalypse?

To answer both of Ed's questions about Chicago's vulnerability to natural disasters and how climate change will affect the city, I sat down with Suzanne Malik McKenna.

She's been working on this very issue for more than 20 years.

And as former commissioner of the environment for Chicago, not only did she plan for disasters, but her job also required her to think about the ways climate change may make Chicago more vulnerable to nature's extremes.

And she says for Chicago, there's good news and bad news. So we started with the good news.

The good news is we're not going to get some of the catastrophic storms we've been seeing

just even in the last month, hurricanes, tidal waves, you know, even some earthquakes that are

much more intense along the coasts. We're in a place where we have more fresh water than anywhere

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