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More than 40 people have drowned in France over the past five days as the country is scorched by a brutal heatwave.
French prime minister Sébastien Lecornu announced the deaths at an emergency cabinet meeting Tuesday, calling them a “tragic scourge,” per The New York Times. Most occurred while swimming in unsupervised areas like lakes and canals, with many of the victims teenagers.
“All the records, locally or nationally, are being broken every day or night when it comes to temperatures,” Lecornu said.
France is trapped in what experts call a “heat dome,” a weather phenomenon where high pressures in the atmosphere allow heat to build up in a concentrated and stationary area, effectively turning it into a giant furnace. Climate change is increasing the intensity and frequency of these events.
Since the heat wave began in the middle of last week, it’s unleashed record breaking temperatures across the country, with more than half of France under a red alert for heat wave conditions, per the NYT. The highest was 112 degrees Fahrenheit in a region in southwest France. To put this into perspective, only parts of the Sahara, the Middle East, and the deserts in the southwestern US were forecasted to be hotter that day, The Washington Post reported.
The worst may be yet to come for other parts of the country. Paris is forecasted to hit 104 degrees Fahrenheit this week, with portions of central France expected to experience an even higher 109 degrees.
According to the country’s national weather agency Météo-France, France recorded its hottest night since temperature measurements began in 1947, with the average temperature between Monday and Tuesday hitting nearly 71 degrees Fahrenheit.
In a country where air conditioning is both uncommon and unfashionable, many have sought relief by swimming, despite the danger involved.
“During heat waves like this, it’s no small matter to go swimming in areas that aren’t supervised,” Marina Ferrari, the minister of sports, said on French radio on Tuesday, per the NYT.
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