PARIS (AP) — For mortuary owner Zouhaeir Hertelli, business has taken an unthinkable turn amid Europe’s record-shattering 2022 heat wave: every few minutes, his phone buzzes with a desperate question from funeral directors and grieving families alike: do you have any cold storage space left for another body?
With all 32 spots in his refrigerated mortuary already occupied, Hertelli has been forced to turn away hundreds of families, repeating the devastating word “No” again and again. “We’re facing a really catastrophic situation,” he told reporters. “I’m getting hundreds of calls.”
As the blistering heat dome drifted eastward across Europe over the weekend, leaving a trail of fatalities in its wake, France has begun the grim work of counting the human cost of the extreme temperatures that first settled over the country in mid-June.
Full official mortality counts will take weeks or months to compile, as public health teams cross-reference death certificates and verify heat as a contributing cause. But even the earliest data makes clear the unprecedented toll of this unrelenting heat event, which has hit older and isolated populations particularly hard.
France’s national public health agency released its first preliminary assessment of the crisis, confirming a dramatic spike in deaths during the heat wave’s peak last week. Temperatures soared above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across most of the country, and record-breaking overnight highs left vulnerable bodies with no chance to cool down and recover — a deadly one-two punch that overwhelmed natural defenses.
On the nation’s all-time hottest day, which broke a record set just 24 hours earlier, more than 1,200 deaths were recorded across France. That number climbed to more than 1,400 the following day, and stayed at that elevated level on the third day of peak heat. For comparison, the average daily death toll in April and May 2022, before the heat wave arrived, ranged between 900 and 1,000.
The agency estimates that at least 1,000 excess deaths occurred over just those three days, but warns the final toll will be higher. Many deaths occurred in private homes and elderly care facilities, where death registrations are often processed manually rather than electronically, leading to delays in official counting. “Mortality will as a consequence be higher than these first figures,” the agency stated.
Eighty-five percent of the deaths registered so far from the three-day peak are people aged 65 and older, and deaths at home have jumped by roughly 40% compared to pre-heat wave levels, with the Paris region seeing the sharpest increase.
Hertelli and other funeral industry professionals across the capital report that all municipal and private mortuary cold storage filled within days of the heat peak. Paris City Hall has responded by installing two temporary cold storage units with 20 spots each at municipal mortuaries, and local hospitals have made an additional 50 spaces available.
Even with the extra capacity, the shortage remains acute. Hertelli says funeral directors he has spoken with are transporting bodies as far as Chartres, 50 miles southwest of Paris, to find available storage. He has submitted a request to local authorities for permission to park temporary refrigerated shipping containers outside his mortuary, located near Paris Orly Airport, but has not yet received 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.”
This heat wave has already surpassed the 2003 European heat event that killed an estimated 15,000 people in France and sparked a national reckoning over the care of vulnerable elderly populations. A 2021 heat wave also killed more than 5,700 people across the country. Many funeral and public health professionals worry that the hard-won lessons of past heat crises have been forgotten as record heat becomes more common.
Véronique Bertrand, a funeral director based in Paris, notes that most of the recent fatalities she has handled were isolated seniors who lived alone at home. “Given the circumstances in which they were found, there can be no other conclusion than that these were deaths caused by the heat,” she said.
Bertrand called for a renewal of the community solidarity that emerged after the 2003 tragedy, when neighbors began checking in on isolated older residents to ensure they were staying hydrated and cool. “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.”