Mortuaries across Paris are struggling to cope with an unprecedented surge in deaths as a record-breaking heatwave continues to claim lives, leaving funeral directors and grieving families desperate for space.
Zouhaeir Hertelli, a mortuary owner in the French capital, finds his phone ringing incessantly. With all 32 places in his cold room now occupied, he is forced to repeatedly deliver the grim news: “Non.” “We’re facing a really catastrophic situation,” he said. “I’m getting hundreds of calls.”
As the historic heatwave moved its deadly temperatures eastward across Europe this weekend, France began the difficult task of assessing the human cost left in its wake. While the full statistical and public health work of tallying heat-related deaths could take weeks or even months, it is already clear that the intense, unrelenting extreme temperatures have exacted a terrible toll, particularly among older people who died at home.
Hertelli underscored the dire situation, stating: “We’re dealing with an enormous spike of deaths because of the heat wave and we’re really full, full, full.”
In its first preliminary estimate, the national public health agency said deaths surged during the heat wave’s peak in France last week, which roasted most of Europe’s largest country with temperatures that soared in many places above 40C (104 F) and also broke records for nighttime highs — an exhausting one-two punch for fatigued bodies.
Public Health France said there were more than 1,200 deaths last Wednesday, when France registered its hottest-ever day, breaking a record that had been set just the previous day.
Deaths then increased to more than 1,400 on Thursday and another 1,400 on Friday, it said. By way of comparison, the pre-heat wave death rate in April and May was around 900 to 1,000 per day, it said.
The agency cautioned that its estimate of at least 1,000 additional deaths during those three sizzling days alone is expected to 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.
“Mortality will as a consequence be higher than these first figures,” the agency said.
It said that 85% of the deaths registered so far during the three days it studied involved people aged 65 and above and that there was a sharp increase in deaths at home — up by about 40% — particularly in the Paris region.
Hertelli and others in the funeral industry said Paris mortuaries quickly ran out of storage space. City Hall said two temporary storage units, with 20 places each, were installed for municipal mortuaries and that city hospitals provided another 50 additional places.
Still, Hertelli said funeral directors he spoke to told him they were having to store bodies as far away as Chartres — 80 kilometers (50 miles) from Paris — and in other regions around the capital. To open more space, he said he has asked authorities for permission to temporarily install refrigerated containers outside his mortuary, which is next to Paris’ Orly airport, but is still waiting for a green light.
“Families are suffering,” he said. “We have no solution to offer them, because the funeral homes are full. So we are deeply affected, we have empathy for them, but there’s nothing we can offer. We are really facing a problem, a big problem,” he said.
Historic high temperatures in 2003, surpassed this time, were blamed for 15,000 deaths, provoking a national reckoning about care of older people, who were particularly hard-hit. More than 5,700 deaths were also attributed to heat during an exceptionally hot summer last year.
Véronique Bertrand, a Paris funeral director, said she fears that lessons have been forgotten.
“Most of the deaths that we are dealing with at the moment were people who were living alone at home, isolated. Given the circumstances in which they were found, there can be no other conclusion than that these were deaths caused by the heat,” Bertrand said.
“I think people absolutely need to wake up, that solidarity needs to come back, that what happened in 2003 led to a movement in that direction, with people thinking about their neighbors, of those around them who live alone and perhaps checking from time to time that they’re drinking water and are being looked after,” she said.
“With the passing years, we’ve perhaps forgotten that it could happen again and that things would even perhaps be worse.”
