France recorded 1,000 excess deaths during the heatwave that has swept Europe, causing havoc in its path.
The French public health agency announced the figure on Sunday, warning that it could continue to climb.
Sante Publique said most of the fatalities involved older people and that it expected the mortality rate to rise as more information became available about deaths in residential care and homes.
Europeans have been enduring blistering conditions during a heatwave that has been linked to dozens of deaths – shattering records, disrupting power generation and damaging infrastructure. Preliminary all-time temperature records were set on Saturday in Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic, and a new mark for the month of June in Switzerland. Similar records had been broken earlier this week in the UK.
Scientists have said the heatwave, which began on June 20, was the worst recorded in Europe, where the climate is changing faster than the global average.
They said it would have been virtually impossible without man-made climate change, which has made this week’s night-time temperatures 100 times more likely than they would have been even two decades ago. “This heat isn’t pleasant summer weather. It’s a health crisis,” Katrin Goering-Eckardt, a German federal lawmaker and former parliamentary leader of the Green Party, said on X. Such was the heat in Berlin, where temperatures climbed to 39 C on Saturday, that police deployed two water cannons in the city to lightly spray people trying to cool down.
Last week French police have opened an involuntary manslaughter probe after two children, aged 2 and 4, died in the heat. A public prosecutor in Carpentras, southeast France, said that the children died on Monday after being found unconscious by their mother in their family’s car. A public prosecutor in Carpentras, southeast France, said that the children died on Monday after being found unconscious by their mother in their family’s car.
There were also reports of a huge increase in drownings across France across the week
The heatwave has been moving east. But while France’s weather agency said the extreme heat had diminished in most parts of the country, some areas in the northeast were still under a heatwave advisory.
Health Minister Stephanie Rist told La Tribune newspaper that the impact of the heatwave could linger for as long as 10 days after the weather had ebbed.
“The episode is not finished,” she told broadcaster BFM.
Most of the deaths involved people aged 65 and older, though the health effects of the extreme heat affected all categories of the population, Sante Publique said.
Elsewhere in Europe, Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant will likely need to reduce output by an additional 320 MW on Sunday due to the high temperature of the Danube River that it uses as a coolant, the government said on its website.
Saturday’s new preliminary German record of 41.5 C in Moeckern-Drewitz in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt topped a record set just the day before of 41.3 C near Saarbruecken on the French border, Germany’s Meteorological Service said. The Danish Meteorological Institute meanwhile reported a 37 C reading north of the city of Aarhus on Saturday, the highest on record since measurements began in 1874.
Officials in the Czech Republic measured a record 40.9 C north of Prague, the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute said.
In the Slovak capital Bratislava, authorities recorded the hottest night on record on Friday.
