The heat wave of unprecedented precocity is growing in France, with a third of the country placed on vigilance on Friday, with heat peaks expected above 40 degrees, as in Spain, already faced with several forest fires.
The heat wave of unprecedented precocity is growing in France, with a third of the country placed on vigilance on Friday, with heat peaks expected above 40 degrees, as in Spain, already faced with several forest fires. In total, 37 French departments, or 18 million people, are affected by this early heat wave, which arrived from the Maghreb via the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain, temperatures soared last weekend, with peaks of up to 43 degrees and several forest fires, especially in Catalonia.
In France, 40°C will be frequently reached or even exceeded on Friday over a large south-west quarter, according to Météo-France. Thursday, the thermometer has already climbed to 40 ° C in Saint-Jean-de-Minervois, (south), a record of earliness for metropolitan France excluding Corsica, according to Météo-France. The Ministry of Health has activated a free Heatwave info service number and that of Education has announced that schoolchildren and college students from the 12 departments in red will be able to stay at home on Friday. Red vigilance, the highest level of the “national heat wave plan”, will begin Friday from 2 p.m. in 12 departments located in the south-west and the Atlantic coast. Météo-France has also extended orange vigilance to a total of 25 departments.
Climate change marker
“This is the earliest heat wave ever recorded in France” since 1947, says Matthieu Sorel, climatologist at Météo-France. “Many monthly or even absolute records (…) should be broken in several regions”, he said, seeing it as a “marker of climate change”. This heat wave, which comes after a particularly hot and dry spring, will further aggravate the dryness of the soil, particularly agricultural, while several departments are already restricting the use of water.
In northern Italy, water is already rationed in several towns in the Po Plain and Lombardy is preparing to declare a state of emergency in the face of a record drought threatening crops. The Po plain, which crosses the north of the country and is home to important agricultural crops, is facing its worst drought in 70 years. In France, this is the fourth time – and the earliest in the season – that heat wave red vigilance has been used since the system was put in place after the lessons learned from the historic heat wave of 2003 which killed more than 15,000 people in the country.
Twenty years later, retirement homes have put in place measures to protect their residents with watering facades, ice cubes in drinks, fans and prolonged sequences in air-conditioned rooms. But seniors isolated at home remain vulnerable. “We are even more vigilant than usual with the elders. It’s hard for them. Often, they are alone, physically diminished, with a loss of autonomy”, testifies Sarah Jalabert, home nurse in the Tarn (south- west). In this region, several sports meetings and public events have been canceled by the authorities.
Further north, in Vendée, the prefecture has lifted the confinement measures for poultry following the avian flu epizootic. With the heat, air quality has also deteriorated in several regions, with ozone pollution peaks in the Paris region and in the east, where road users are asked to reduce their speed. . For their part, the firefighters on alert watch for the outbreak of fire, favored by the heat and the drying of the vegetation. The multiplication of heat waves, particularly in Europe, is a direct consequence of global warming, explain the scientists, with greenhouse gas emissions increasing both the intensity, duration and frequency of these phenomena. Spain, which this year experienced its hottest May since the beginning of the century, according to the meteorological agency, has already gone through four episodes of extreme temperatures in the last ten months.