France has put emergency services and military forces on wildfire alert, restricting public alcohol consumption and canceling some outdoor sports events to cope with a heat wave unfurling across parts of Europe.
About a third of France was under the national weather service’s heat red alert yesterday and temperatures were high nationwide, expected to reach 40 degrees Celsius in some areas, in a country where air-conditioning isn’t widespread. The forecast for today is even hotter.
The Eiffel Tower and other Paris venues set up misting stations to cool crowds, among a raft of measures announced by national and local authorities to minimize risks.
More than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes over the last four years, and most of the fatalities were preventable, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Europe office said this month. More above-average temperatures are expected this summer, which can cause heat exhaustion and life-threatening heat stroke .
WHO’s Europe office called for countries and institutions to implement heat plans, such as opening cooling centers or introducing breaks or flexible shifts that enable workers to stay out of the midday sun.
In Italy, authorities expanded heat warnings, referred to locally as “red flags,” from seven to eight cities for yesterday, in northern and central parts of the country, out of the 27 monitored nationally by the Health Ministry. Temps in the “red” cities are mostly in the upper-30s Celsius.
At one farm outside Milan, owners set up fans and sprinklers to keep cows cool. In Rome, tourists dunked their arms and occasionally their faces into the city’s famed fountain pools.
The French government banned public drinking in ‘’red alert’’ zones, and ordered organizers of annual Music Day events to limit alcohol use to “preserve emergency services and allow medics to concentrate on taking care of the most vulnerable.”
Authorities are notably worried about people living in the baking streets, and elderly people in nursing homes or isolated in their homes. About 15,000 older people died in a 2003 heat wave that became a reckoning for France.
The government announced on June 20 reinforced wildfire readiness and ordered tightened surveillance of water supplies to France’s many nuclear reactors.
Schools will only be closed as a last recourse, the government said, though end-of-year exams held in the afternoons may be delayed until the following morning or otherwise rearranged.
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu convened a government heat crisis meeting on June 20 and another one yesterday, in the face of what the national weather service called a “widespread, long-lasting and intense” hot spell.
Lecornu ordered government ministers to plan for better adapting France to heat waves in the future, including “via air conditioning, if necessary.”
