France outage leaves 68,000 homes without power as record heatwave spreads north
A power outage caused by a record-breaking heatwave left around 68,000 households without electricity in France's western Brittany on Wednesday as the national weather agency issued a red alert for extreme weather covering most of the country, including the northernmost region around Calais.
By FRANCE 24
Human-caused climate change is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and UN climate agency projections say the next five years are likely to shatter more heat records.
In a country without widespread air conditioning, schools, public transportation and sporting events have been affected. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower closed in the afternoon instead of late at night, as it usually does. The Louvre museum said it would close two hours earlier than normal from Wednesday through Saturday.
“Although parts of its historic building are naturally resilient, the museum remains vulnerable and is not sufficiently adapted to climate change,” Louvre officials said. “Heat buildup is greatest toward the end of the day and is further intensified by high visitor numbers.”
Read moreFrance tries to handle extreme temperatures as heatwave carries on
This heatwave, coming early in the summer, has already been compared to the August 2003 heat wave that roasted France with the highest temperatures in over half a century. It caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them among older people in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.
Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, with temperatures increasing twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Over the last four years, more than 200,000 people across Europe died from heat-related causes, and most of those deaths were preventable, the World Health Organization’s Europe office said this month.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP, AP)