PARIS—France recorded its hottest day ever June 23 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.
Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts—like France—about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.
The record of 85.6 F for France’s national thermal indicator—an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather station—was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe’s largest country. The conditions were 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 84.9 F.
Temperature records also tumbled at individual weather stations and on consecutive days in some towns as daytime highs climbed well above 104 F, Météo France said.
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.
Météo France said the heat wave has reached what it described as a “plateau of severity,” with unrelenting heat, day and night. A growing number of regions will tip into the red again June 24 as the heat spreads across more than half of the country, including the northernmost tip of France, the weather service said. (AP)