France: 40 Drown as Hottest Night on Record Grips Europe
Forty people have drowned trying to cool off, two small children died in a hot car, and France just recorded its warmest night on record. The heat is now a body count, not a forecast.
At least 40 people have drowned in France since Thursday while trying to cool off in rivers, lakes and unsupervised quarries, the deadliest edge of a heatwave that on Tuesday handed the country its hottest night since national records began in 1947.
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu announced the toll after an emergency meeting in Paris, calling the deaths a “tragic scourge” and noting that most of the victims were young. They are the first victims of the crisis we are facing
, he said, as Meteo-France forecast highs near 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) across most of the country.
That is the part of a heatwave the temperature maps never show. The headline number is the thermometer; the cost is counted in emergency rooms and at riverbanks. France’s civil safety service had already pleaded with people to swim only in places that are supervised
after 13 drownings between Sunday and Monday, spokesperson Jérôme Boulanger said.
Heat kills indoors, too. In Carpentras, in the southeast, first responders could not resuscitate two children aged two and four found unconscious in the family car outside their home, a local prosecutor said. In the Bordeaux region, three people between 80 and 95 died over the weekend from heat-related illness, local official Sophie Brocas told France TV. Both ends of the age range, the same cause.
The records fell in sequence. France’s national overnight indicator — an average of 30 stations — hit 21.6C (70.9F) from Monday into Tuesday, edging past the 21.4C set on 25 July 2019, according to Meteo-France data reported by NPR. Bordeaux reached 41.9C and Poitiers 41.2C. The weather service placed 54 departments under its red alert, the highest level, in a country where air conditioning is still the exception rather than the rule; more than 1,350 schools closed and thousands more cut their hours.
This was never only France’s problem. Britain’s Met Office warned that a four-day spell could push temperatures above 39C (102F), threatening the June record of 35.6C set in 1957 and 1976, just weeks after the UK logged its hottest May on record. In Spain, San Sebastián on the traditionally cool northern coast was forecast to hit 40C, more than double its usual June reading, Al Jazeera reported.
The mechanism behind it has a name. A stalled high-pressure system — an “omega block,” shaped like the Greek letter — parked a dome of hot air over western Europe and refused to move, the same set-up that CBC News described baking the continent. It is the kind of pattern that used to be rare. A World Meteorological Organization report in April found Europe is warming at more than double the global average, which is why a heat dome that would once have been a summer anomaly now arrives in June and stays.
France has been here before, and worse: the 2003 heatwave killed roughly 15,000 people over a brutal August fortnight and rewrote the country’s emergency playbook. The grim measure of progress is that the systems built afterward — the alerts, the school closures, the public warnings spreading across a red-alert map that had already swallowed dozens of departments — are now being tested in June rather than August, under the same heat dome that settled over the continent around the solstice. The forecast eases by the weekend. The pattern it belongs to does not.
