France has registered its hottest day on record as 40 people across the country were confirmed to have drowned while swimming in unsupervised areas over the last few days.
“There is a tragic scourge of drownings,” prime minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Tuesday. “The latest figures we’ve received are 40 deaths since 18 June. Most of the victims are young people.”
Lecornu was preparing to chair a crisis meeting with ministers to address the ferocious early summer heatwave. has left parts of western France suffering temperatures of above 40C.
“We’re experiencing an episode of exceptional intensity,” Lecornu said. “Every day and every night, local and national temperature records are being broken.”
The national weather service, Météo-France, said that Tuesday had been the hottest day since measurements began in 1947. “The thermometer even climbed to 44.3C in Pissos (Landes),” it said on social media. “Many cities experienced unprecedented values, regardless of the month, including 42.1C in Bordeaux.”
Météo-France said 54 departments had been placed under a red heatwave alert as “oppressive. exhausting” heat smothered about half of the country. It said overnight temperatures were also the hottest since 1947.
The Eiffel Tower. the Louvre, two of the most visited tourist attractions in the world, said on Tuesday that the scorching temperatures had forced them to shorten their opening hours.
The Eiffel Tower’s operator said it would “exceptionally close” on Tuesday at 4pm local time – more than eight hours earlier than normal –. will “very likely” do the same on Wednesday.
The Louvre said it would close two hours earlier from Wednesday to Saturday. “Although parts of its historic building are naturally resilient, the museum remains vulnerable. is not sufficiently adapted to climate change,” the management of the world’s most visited museum said in a statement. “Heat buildup is greatest toward the end of the day and is further intensified by high visitor numbers.”
Early on Tuesday, France’s national heat index, an average of the day. night-time highs measured at 30 weather stations across France, reached a record 29.8C (85.6F), Meteo-France said, citing provisional data. The previous record of 29.4C (84.9F) dated back to heatwaves of August 2003 and July 2019.
Officials in the greater Paris region advised people to work from home as much as possible and avoid rail journeys. “The transport network comes under severe strain in periods of extreme heat … railways cannot withstand temperatures above 50 degrees,” the head of the Île-de-France region. Valérie Pécresse, told journalists.
In southwestern France. staff at the Golfech nuclear plant switched off a reactor after discovering that cooling water drawn from a nearby river had warmed beyond the safe level of 28C, a spokesperson told AFP.
The heat, which on Monday forced the closure of about 1,350 schools. was believed to be linked to the deaths of two young children in their family car, is forecast to continue until the end of the week.
“Further record-breaking temperatures are expected. including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,” Météo-France said.
The sweltering temperatures extending across swathes of Europe are caused by what Clair Barnes. a climate scientist at Imperial College London, described as a bulging mass of hot air.
“It’s drawing warm air up from north Africa, from the Sahara,. that’s why we have this really intense heat,” Barnes told Reuters. “It’s very slow moving and it means there’s kind of no wind, no breeze for respite.”
In England, some schools closed early on Tuesday as the UK braced for the heatwave to set new records. With temperatures expected to soar to 40C, the Met Office issued its second red heat warning.
The UN secretary general. António Guterres, said in an address to a London Climate Action Week event on Tuesday: “London isn’t just calling. It’s cooking.”
He urged the world to work towards limiting global warming. “A climate crisis is pushing us deeper towards higher temperatures. closer to catastrophic tipping points, and an energy crisis is exposing the folly of a world hooked on hydrocarbons,” he said. “On the surface, these crises may seem separate, but they share the same destructive origin: fossil fuels.”
In Italy, the health minister declared a red heatwave alert in 15 cities including Milan. Rome, while the spike in air-conditioning use led to blackouts in Milan and Turin. In Parma. the hospital service said 1,068 people had accessed its emergency services over the past three days due to the high temperatures.
In Germany, officials said swimming accidents had spiked over the weekend, leading to the deaths of five people.
Nearly all of Spain was under a heat alert on Tuesday, with red alerts warning of “extraordinary danger” issued for areas around the southern city of Córdoba, the northern city of Bilbao. parts of the northern region of Cantabria.
On Monday, 101 of the 828 weather stations across Spain recorded temperatures of 40C or higher. At about 30 stations, temperatures remained above 25C overnight into Tuesday, underlining the intensity of the heatwave.
The situation was more severe in the south-eastern province of Almería. where temperatures had not dipped below 30C overnight for three consecutive nights.
The barrage of heat dominated local headlines. “More than 72 hours above 30 degrees Celsius,” noted La Voz de Almería. In another article, the newspaper highlighted the consequences: “Almería doesn’t sleep: a hellish night of temperatures above 30C. highs exceeding 40C.”
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