France outage leaves 68,000 homes without power as record heatwave spreads north

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. Europe's record-breaking heatwave left around 68,000 households without electricity in northwestern France on Wednesday, authorities said, in the country's first major power outage of the latest bout of extreme weather. The outage, which involved a transformer on the electricity grid, was related to extreme temperatures and did not injure anyone, the prefecture in the coastal department of Finistere said in a statement. France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries. The outage in Brittany took place around 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Tuesday in the commune of Ergue-Gaberic near the city of Quimpe, the prefecture said. While teams from French grid operators RTE and Enedis had worked through the night to fix the issue, power is not expected to be restored in full until the end of the day at the earliest. Up to 106,000 clients of the French power network were left without power by late Tuesday, as the continent's sweltering heatwave pushed the country into its hottest day ever. "For technical reasons, RTE will not be able to re-connect the affected households during the course of the day; connections will be made, at the earliest, by the end of Wednesday," the operator said. Read moreFrance’s latest heatwave: ‘Temperatures will fall, and we won’t talk about it anymore’ Finistere is one of 58 French departments under the highest red alert for extreme heat on Wednesday, with temperatures of 39C to 41C expected on Wednesday from Brittany to the Paris region. The extreme weather is being driven by atmospheric and circulation patterns that keep hot air trapped in place for days, with these factors worsened by global warming, experts say. Tuesday's record of 29.8C (85.6 F) for France’s national thermal indicator – an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations – is only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe's largest country, with severe conditions likely to persist at least until the weekend. “Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,” the Meteo France weather service said. France's previous hottest days were recorded during heat waves of August 2003 and July 2019, with an average temperature of 29.4C (84.9 F). Temperature records also tumbled at individual weather stations and on consecutive days in some towns as daytime highs climbed well above 40 C (104 F), Meteo France said. 'Dubai temperatures' In the French capital, Gin Dujardin said the heat forced him to halt his work fixing roofs, which in Paris often have galvanized zinc coverings. “It’s very, very hard because the zinc is very hot. The welds don’t hold,” he said. “It’s Dubai temperatures. It’s impossible.” France has recorded 40 fatalities from drowning in the past week as people seek relief in rivers and other bodies of water, despite authorities' warnings about unsupervised swimming. Most of the drownings involved young people, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said. Meteo France said the heatwave has reached what it described as a “plateau of severity,” with unrelenting heat, day and night. 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)