A wave of extreme heat has swept across much of Europe, killing at least three elderly people in France, prompting governments to close thousands of schools, cancel trains and ban outdoor drinking, and pushing forecasters to warn that the worst may still be ahead.
The deaths of three people aged between 80 and 95 were recorded over the weekend in the Bordeaux region of south-western France, where local officials confirmed they had died as a direct result of the heat. Thirteen more people drowned across the country in rivers and lakes, many of them trying to cool down, after emergency services pleaded with the public to swim only in areas with lifeguards on duty. A 17-year-old boy was swept away by the current of the Dordogne River. In Germany, three swimmers went missing after entering the Rhine, and a 23-year-old man drowned in a lake near the city of Karlsruhe.
France’s national weather service placed 49 of its 96 mainland administrative areas under the most severe level of heat warning on Monday, the 22nd of June meaning roughly 35 million people were living in zones considered at high risk. Temperatures in Bordeaux were forecast to climb past 42 degrees Celsius on Monday. Forecasters said Paris could reach 40 degrees Celsius, a threshold the capital has crossed only once before in June. The country’s health minister, Stéphanie Rist, offered little reassurance when she appeared on national television. “We’re heading for, at the very least, several days of very, very hot weather,” she said. “We don’t know when temperatures will start falling.”
This is already France’s second severe heat episode in less than a month. An unusually intense spell in late May broke monthly records across the country and was linked to several deaths before it passed. The current wave is being compared by meteorologists to the catastrophic European heatwaves of 2003 and 2019, both of which caused thousands of deaths across the continent. One striking difference this time is the timing: those previous events came in late July and early August, when the summer is fully established. The heat now battering France and its neighbours has arrived at the end of June, weeks earlier than the worst historical precedents.
The cause, weather scientists say, is a stationary mass of high pressure sitting over western Europe, drawing extremely hot, dry air northward from the Sahara and compressing it as it descends. With no significant weather systems moving in to break the pattern, the heat has nowhere to go. Overnight temperatures in some areas are not falling below 20 degrees Celsius, a phenomenon sometimes described as a tropical night which prevents the human body from recovering its normal temperature before the next day’s heat begins to build. May’s dry spell stripped the soil of moisture beforehand, removing one of the natural mechanisms that would otherwise help moderate temperatures.
The disruption to everyday life has been considerable. Almost 2,700 schools across France either closed entirely or shortened their hours on Monday. The head of the French national railway, Jean Castex, advised elderly and vulnerable travellers to postpone journeys if they possibly could, warning that train services were being disrupted. Speed restrictions were imposed on several rail lines to prevent metal tracks from expanding and warping in the heat, and dozens of long-distance services were cancelled outright. Air conditioning systems were reported to be under severe strain on the trains that continued running. The Paris region announced it was spending one million euros fitting portable cooling units to classrooms. Parks in the capital were kept open through the night to give people somewhere to find relief.
France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, took the additional step of banning alcohol at outdoor public events in the worst-affected areas, including at the annual Fête de la Musique a nationwide celebration of music held on the summer solstice. The reasoning was direct: reduce the pressure on hospitals and emergency services so they could concentrate on the people most at risk. Emergency call volume in Paris jumped by sixty per cent on Sunday evening compared to normal levels for that time of night.
The heat did not stop at France’s borders. In Spain, the national weather agency issued its first red alert of the summer for the Basque Country in the north, forecasting temperatures in San Sebastián reaching 40 degrees Celsius almost double the typical figure for late June in that city. A public screening of Spain’s World Cup match against Saudi Arabia in central Madrid was cancelled because the temperature in the fan zone was deemed unsafe. Spain recorded 101 heat-related deaths in May alone, the highest figure for that month since records began in 2015. In Germany, temperatures were expected to approach 38 or 39 degrees Celsius in central and southern areas, and electricity prices surged by nearly 30 per cent as demand for cooling systems drove up consumption. In Italy, the cities of Rome, Florence, Bologna and Turin were all placed under red alert. In Turin, heat-stressed underground power cables caused repeated blackouts. The United Kingdom’s Met Office extended an extreme heat warning covering most of southern England and parts of the Midlands and Wales, forecasting temperatures up to 38 degrees Celsius by mid-week and warning of likely disruption to roads, railways and aviation.
The human and economic cost of the episode continues to grow as the week progresses. Emergency services and military units across France and Spain were placed on heightened wildfire alert, with the combination of dried-out vegetation and extreme heat raising the risk of fires spreading rapidly through rural areas.
Scientists who study the relationship between weather and broader climate patterns pointed, as they have with previous European heatwaves, to the long-term warming of the atmosphere as a factor that makes extreme events of this kind more intense and more frequent than they would otherwise be. Europe, according to scientific assessments, has been warming at roughly twice the global average rate, meaning the same weather patterns that always brought summer heat now produce more extreme outcomes. Events that would have been rare a generation ago are becoming a near-annual experience across the continent.
For the tens of millions of people living through the current episode, however, the long view offers little comfort. The immediate task, for governments and individuals alike, is the same one that comes back every summer now with greater urgency: keep the most vulnerable people alive until the heat breaks.
