In the days passing, the city of Chicago and the surrounding metropolitan area experienced temperatures colder than Antarctica. The temperatures began to dip around Tuesday night and continued to fall going into Wednesday morning, experiencing wind chills up to -50 degrees. Many school districts, including Chicago Public Schools, cancelled school due to the extremely low temperatures which if exposed for too long, could very easily result in frostbite to the school districts some 400,000 students. The high was a record low temperature recorded in Chicago’s history. While Thursday’s temperatures were a tad more tolerable, with a low of minus 21 and high of 1 degree, the prevailing cold snap took a terrible toll on one of Chicago’s most vulnerable populations. Exposure to the cold was determined to be the cause or contributing factor in the deaths of two seniors found Thursday in Chicago, according the Cook County medical examiner’s office.