PARIS (AP) — The phone at one Paris mortuary rings every few minutes, and the answer is almost always the same. Since a record-breaking heat wave began claiming lives across France and filling cold storage facilities beyond capacity, funeral directors and grieving families have been calling mortuary owner Zouhaeir Hertelli with one desperate question: Is there any room left?
With all 32 spaces in his cold room occupied, Hertelli finds himself forced to gently say “Non” — again and again.
“We’re facing a really catastrophic situation,” he said. “I’m getting hundreds of calls.”
As the historic heat wave pushed its deadly temperatures eastward into other parts of Europe over the weekend, France began the grim task of counting lives lost in its aftermath.
The full accounting of heat-related deaths — a process that can take weeks or even months — has only just begun. But it is already clear that the suffering caused by the relentless extreme temperatures was severe in France, the first country to be struck starting in mid-June. Older people who died alone at home made up a significant portion of the casualties.
“We’re dealing with an enormous spike of deaths because of the heat wave and we’re really full, full, full,” Hertelli said.
In an initial preliminary estimate, France’s national public health agency reported that deaths climbed sharply during the heat wave’s peak last week, when temperatures in many areas surpassed 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across much of the country. Nighttime temperatures also broke records, leaving already exhausted bodies with no chance to recover.
Public Health France reported more than 1,200 deaths last Wednesday — the day France recorded its hottest temperature ever, breaking a record that had only been set the day before. The death toll climbed further to more than 1,400 on Thursday and another 1,400 on Friday. For comparison, France’s typical daily death rate in April and May hovered between 900 and 1,000.
The agency warned that its estimate of at least 1,000 additional deaths during just those three peak days is likely to grow as more death certificates arrive from people who died at home and in care facilities for the elderly — locations where electronic death registration is still not widely used.
“Mortality will as a consequence be higher than these first figures,” the agency stated.
The agency also noted that 85% of deaths recorded during the three days studied involved people aged 65 and older, and that deaths at home jumped by roughly 40%, particularly in the Paris region.
Hertelli and other funeral industry professionals said Paris mortuaries ran out of storage space almost immediately. City Hall announced that two temporary storage units, each holding 20 bodies, were set up at municipal mortuaries, and city hospitals added another 50 spaces. Even so, Hertelli said funeral directors told him they were transporting bodies as far as Chartres — 80 kilometers, or about 50 miles, from Paris — and to other surrounding regions just to find available space. He said he has requested permission from authorities to set up refrigerated containers outside his mortuary near Paris’s Orly airport, but is still waiting for approval.
“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.”
The current heat wave surpassed the historic high temperatures of 2003, which were blamed for 15,000 deaths in France and sparked a national conversation about how the country cares for its elderly population. An exceptionally hot summer the previous year was also linked to more than 5,700 deaths.
Paris funeral director Véronique Bertrand said she worries that the hard lessons of 2003 have faded from public memory.
“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.
She urged the public to reconnect with a sense of community responsibility. “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,” Bertrand added.
