It said that 85 percent of the deaths registered so far during the three days it studied involved people aged 65 and above and that there was a sharp increase in deaths at home — up by about 40 percent — particularly in the Paris region.
Hertelli and others in the funeral industry said Paris mortuaries quickly ran out of storage space. City Hall said two temporary storage units, with 20 places each, were installed for municipal mortuaries and that city hospitals provided another 50 additional places.
Still, Hertelli said funeral directors he spoke to told him they were having to store bodies as far away as Chartres — 80 kilometres (50 miles) from Paris — and in other regions around the capital.
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‘Solidarity needs to come back’
To open more space, he said he has asked authorities for permission to temporarily install refrigerated containers outside his mortuary, which is next to Paris’ Orly airport, but is still waiting for a green light.
“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,” he said.
Historic high temperatures in 2003, surpassed this time, were blamed for 15,000 deaths, provoking a national reckoning about the care of older people, who were particularly hard-hit. More than 5,700 deaths were also attributed to heat during an exceptionally hot summer last year.
Véronique Bertrand, a Paris funeral director, said she fears that lessons have been forgotten.
“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.
“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 neighbours, 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.”
