PARIS — Paris mortuaries are overwhelmed as Europe’s record heat wave pushes temperatures to 44 degrees Celsius in the French capital and leaves families and funeral directors scrambling for space for the dead. France’s national public health agency said deaths surged during the heat wave’s peak last week, and the toll is expected to rise as more death certificates come in. The machinery of normal life is already buckling. The people who pay first are the old, the isolated and the dead.
Zouhaeir Hertelli, whose cold room has 32 places, said he has had to turn away callers again and again. “We’re facing a really catastrophic situation,” he said. “I’m getting hundreds of calls.” He said funeral directors were storing bodies as far away as Chartres, 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Paris, and in other regions around the capital. He has asked authorities for permission to temporarily install refrigerated containers outside his mortuary, next to Paris’ Orly airport, and is still waiting for a green light. Bureaucracy, as ever, moves at its own pace while the temperature does not.
Bodies, delays and the state’s slow response
France was the first country hit from mid-June, and Public Health France said there were more than 1,000 additional deaths during three sizzling days it studied, with at least 1,000 additional deaths recorded between 24 and 27 June. The agency said there were more than 1,200 deaths last Wednesday, when France registered its hottest-ever day, more than 1,400 deaths on Thursday and another 1,400 on Friday. It said 85% of the deaths registered so far during those three days involved people aged 65 and above, and that deaths at home rose by about 40%, particularly in the Paris region. The agency cautioned that its estimate would increase as more death certificates come in for people who died at home and in care facilities for older people, where most deaths are still not registered electronically.
The heat wave also broke records for nighttime highs, adding to the strain on fatigued bodies. France is gritting its teeth for a week of record-busting temperatures, with daytime highs above 40C and sleep-robbing sweaty nights. Parisians and tourists sought shade and flocked to air-conditioned museums as the capital baked in the heat. The city’s polished public face kept going. The mortuaries did not.
Véronique Bertrand, a Paris funeral director, said most of the deaths her industry is dealing with are people who were living alone at home and isolated. “I think people absolutely need to wake up, that solidarity needs to come back,” she said. “With the passing years, we’ve perhaps forgotten that it could happen again and that things would even perhaps be worse.” She said the deaths were caused by the heat. That’s the human cost of a system that can count bodies faster than it can protect people.
Fortress Europe, heat edition
The heat wave shifted deadly temperatures eastward across Europe over the weekend. On Sunday, Germany, Czechia, Poland and Hungary reached record temperatures of more than 40C as the heat spread across the region. By Monday, the heat wave had moved east, with Poland, Czechia and Slovakia all expecting record temperatures of more than 40C. Bautzen in eastern Saxony broke the German record for the highest overnight minimum temperature at 29.4C.
The wider European heat wave has also fed political debate. One Guardian briefing said more than 150 million Europeans sweltered in temperatures above 35C, that a heat wave of this magnitude had never been recorded this early in the year, and that when scientists finish their calculations the death toll will probably number in the thousands. It said Spain had recorded more than 100 deaths per day since Wednesday and that French authorities said at least 1,000 additional deaths had been recorded between 24 and 27 June, including four toddlers. It also said a three-year-old boy in a Paris suburb was found dead last week after climbing into a car and becoming trapped.
That briefing said the climate is now at the frontier of the culture wars, with arguments about air conditioning and complaints that people are being “wimps” for complaining about the heat. It said far-right parties can get a boost from extreme weather events by spinning them as a failure of government policy, and quoted Ajit Niranjan, the Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent, saying: “One trend that’s possibly the most counterintuitive about these kinds of moments is that far-right parties who are denying the science of climate change can get a bit of a boost from extreme weather events.” He said: “They spin the extreme weather as a failure of government policy, arguing that focusing on climate change was part of the initial problem, and it is more about mismanagement.” He also said: “Both sides of this issue need to be addressed.”
The same briefing said Patrick Collison, CEO of US tech firm Stripe, posted on social media and asked the AI model Claude to settle the air-conditioning debate for Europeans. It said Claude concluded that the continent needed to throw its weight behind air conditioning and move past “the psychological discomfort” of “admitting that the American approach to summer was correct all along”. It said the far-right National Rally in France announced a “major” plan for AC. Ajit Niranjan said: “Within Europe, air conditioning is nowhere near as big of a fight as some of the international press have made it out to be.” He said: “This meme in the US that we hate air-con and refuse to have it is not really true. It is less common than in rich parts of Asia and North America but, until recently, people did not need it.”
The system wasn’t built for this, and it knew it
The briefing also said the UK and other European countries are unprepared for the strain extreme weather puts on health and travel networks. It said the London ambulance service recorded its busiest ever day for the most serious category of callouts on Wednesday, with 642 responses to reports of cardiac arrests, patients who have stopped breathing and life-threatening injuries, and that two days later the record was broken again, with more 999 calls made than ever before, more even than during the Covid-19 pandemic. It said hundreds of schools closed early, workplaces overheated and train operators asked people not to travel. It said the UK’s record June temperature reached 37.3C and that four tropical nights in a row were recorded at London Heathrow, according to the weather blogger London & Southeast.
The World Health Organization said earlier this month that nearly 200,000 people had died in Europe due to heat in the past four years, and that the majority of those deaths would have been preventable if obvious adaptation measures had been taken. Scientists have long warned that these events were coming, and countries have not done enough to cut emissions from fossil fuels or adapt to the realities of managing the toll on transport and healthcare systems. The numbers keep climbing. The institutions keep arriving late.