Fatal Isolation

The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003

Richard C. Keller

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226256436
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In a cemetery on the southern outskirts of Paris lie the bodies of nearly a hundred of what some have called the first casualties of global climate change. They were the so-called abandoned victims of the worst natural disaster in French history, the devastating heat wave that struck in August 2003, leaving 15, 000 dead. They died alone in Paris and its suburbs, and were then buried at public expense, their bodies unclaimed. They died, and to a great extent lived, unnoticed by their neighbors--their bodies undiscovered in some cases until weeks after their deaths. Fatal Isolation tells the stories of these victims and the catastrophe that took their lives. It explores the multiple narratives of disaster--the official story of the crisis and its aftermath, as presented by the media and the state; the life stories of the individual victims, which both illuminate and challenge the ways we typically perceive natural disasters; and the scientific understandings of disaster and its management. Fatal Isolation is both a social history of risk and vulnerability in the urban landscape and a story of how a city copes with emerging threats and sudden, dramatic change.

1

Stories, Suffering, and the State: The Heat Wave and Narratives of Disaster

In early August 2003, a warm air mass began to move northeast from the Mediterranean across Spain and into southern France. In the course of the next few days, it crept northward, expanding its reach and eventually stabilizing over western and central Europe. The mass was part of a phenomenon known as an “anticyclone,” a large-scale system bound by rotating winds and marked by extremely high pressure that prevents others from displacing or disrupting it. Such systems are common in European summers, in varying degrees of intensity. By 4 August, this anticyclone was firmly implanted, bringing with it a stifling heat with little to no breeze and no precipitation. Much of Europe smoldered under an intense sun for nearly two weeks to follow. The system also intensified concentrations of ground-level ozone. Combined with the overwhelming humidity, the system produced a dizzying cocktail of heat and pollution in urban areas.

While the system encompassed much of Europe, it was particularly intense in France, where it left nearly 15,000 dead in its wake. This chapter plots the chronology of the heat wave disaster, while also presenting the ways the French government and its epidemiological services responded to the crisis in real time. It sketches the dominant narratives that have come to frame the catastrophe in France in its aftermath: those of the media, of the state, and of the epidemiologists who studied the disaster at local and national levels. Finally, it indicates how the state and the media collectively produced a portrait of the heat wave’s “typical” victim and outlined a series of natural and social causes responsible for the making of the disaster. This narrative obviated the state’s culpability for the mismanagement of the catastrophe, while assigning responsibility for the heat wave’s staggering effects to forces beyond the government’s control: natural systems, demographic transformations, failures of social solidarity, and the social particularities of the victims themselves. Such a frame—which epidemiological reports on the disaster reinforced, even if inadvertently—ultimately redirected blame from the state to the heat wave’s victims by underscoring their marginality. This chapter indicates that this gradual realization of a state of disaster, the recriminations that followed, and an effort to establish control over the story of the heat wave distilled the complexities of the catastrophe into a streamlined narrative: one that incorporated many of the disaster’s critical truths, but which also transformed them into a misleadingly simplistic fiction.

A Disaster in Slow Motion

The August heat wave (or canicule, in colloquial French) was in some ways more of the same for the French in the summer of 2003. The country had suffered several heat waves already that summer, the first lasting several days in June and two others lasting roughly a week each in July. Moreover, France had suffered a drought since February of that year. Rainfall levels were down by 50 percent in most regions, and by 80 percent in many more. By June the landscape in much of France was dessicated, more closely resembling typical September conditions than those at the beginning of summer. Wildfires are often a summer problem in France, but in 2003 they scorched more than three times the annual average. Media coverage throughout the summer focused on the devastating consequences of the heat and drought for the nation’s farmers and others who made their living depending on the weather. Emaciated livestock, parched fields, and blazing forests featured regularly on the evening news.

But for most of the French, the summer heat in June and July was merely an inconvenience. Despite the heat’s growing intensity and its effects for farmers, most of the country seemed oblivious, with a few exceptions. The provincial press covered the heat as a human-interest story above all: they showed photos of dogs lazily sleeping off the heat and compared third-trimester pregnancy in such conditions to the stations of the cross. Stifling temperatures in Paris created a boom for café owners, and especially for the ubiquitous bottled-water vendors stationed outside the city’s museums and along tourist thoroughfares, many of whom doubled their prices amid the insatiable demand for cool drinks. Fountains in Parisian parks proved a big draw for tourists, and fans and air conditioners sold out quickly.

When Météo-France, the French national weather service, issued a mild press release warning of an intensifying heat wave on 1 August, the heat appeared primarily as an annoyance. The media focused a number of stories on the heat wave, but mostly in terms of its potential effects for the August vacation period. Since the late 1930s, the August vacation has been a sacrosanct social entitlement in France. Beginning with the Popular Front in 1936, the paid vacation—with enticements to tourism such as discounted rail fares and holiday packages—became an inherent component of French cultural identity. Popular Front leaders encouraged such vacations as a means of stimulating the nation’s (and in particular the worker’s) physical as well as intellectual culture toward the end of producing a total individual. The paid vacation is arguably the movement’s signature achievement as well as its chief legacy.1 As Ellen Furlough has argued, the political securing of paid vacations as a right of citizenship, along with the emergence of a postwar consumer culture, has made tourism a mass phenomenon in France: since the 1980s nearly two-thirds of the French travel during the summer vacation in particular.2 With most of this travel moving from cities toward beaches, the countryside, and mountain resorts, the result is an enormous outward migration from urban areas the first weekend of August.

In 2003 the beginning of the vacation exodus took place on Saturday, 2 August, just as the temperature began to climb. The news that day featured prominent stories about how the heat intersected with the intense highway traffic that marked the departure of millions on vacation. Most of the stories featured interviews with drivers on the highways complaining about sweltering in their un-air-conditioned cars while stuck in traffic jams; others showed tourists napping in the shade at rest stops en route to their destinations. But the overall atmosphere was cheerful, with the heat presenting a challenge to what some voyagers described as an obligation to travel: “For vacation, you have to do what you have to do!”3 A few warnings stand out, but not really about the temperatures or about dehydration. One meteorologist reminded motorists to wear their seat belts while traveling; a reporter for the major television network TF1 remarked, “At the beach, the only worries are sunstroke and sunburn.” But for the most part, the weather seemed to be a cause for celebration rather than foreboding: a sunny, albeit hot, forecast awaited vacationers at Mediterranean beaches and Alpine campgrounds for days to come. As a meteorologist for France 2, another of France’s most popular television networks, announced on the evening of 1 August, “The water’s warm. . . . Take advantage of it!”4 On the same day, Catherine Laborde, a meteorologist for TF1, described the anticyclone as “protecting” or “sheltering” France from clouds and rainfall.5

Meanwhile, out of sight of the media, Bodo was dying from the heat in his apartment in the Boulevard de Port-Royal in Paris’s fifth arrondissement. Bodo had emigrated from Germany decades earlier, and lived alone in a tiny apartment on the sixth floor directly beneath the building’s zinc roof, with western-exposed windows. Bodo had few social contacts; his only known family member was a half brother in Germany, who had met him only once for about a half hour thirty years earlier.6 Bodo’s apartment was a chambre de bonne or former servant’s quarters, converted into an independent apartment of about ninety square feet. When I visited his apartment in June 2007, the minuscule elevator was stifling, despite a comfortable temperature in the low 20s C (low 70s F) outside; a downstairs neighbor with the same exposure had covered the apartment windows with newspaper to block the blazing afternoon sunlight. In August 2003, his neighbors on the lower floors were all away on vacation, according to one resident. But one of his neighbors on the sixth floor had remained in the city and discovered Bodo’s body on 2 August. The neighbor saw that Bodo’s door was ajar, and after calling for him, attempted to open the door. Bodo’s body was blocking the open door, as if he had fallen to his death while opening the door to seek help.

In the coming days, troubling signs of a disaster in slow motion began to accumulate. The heat and the drought were consistently the top stories in national media. While some commentators refer to heat waves as the “neutron bomb” of natural disasters7—crises that kill people while leaving infrastructure largely intact—the French heat wave, combined with the brutal drought, was anomalous, presenting its effects on the landscape and the built environment before it registered on human bodies. Reports in early August focused on the weather’s effects on local ecologies and infrastructure, as they had for much of the summer, but with a new degree of urgency. Beginning on 1 August, nearly all domestic news coverage was connected in some way to the heat. Reports of uncontrollable wildfires dominated coverage, followed by stories about excessive ozone pollution fouling the air of France’s major cities as a consequence of the heat. Farmers complained of drastic losses and pleaded for government aid to buy water and hay for their livestock.

The problem was national in scale. The volume of the Loire River had shrunk by 20 percent as a consequence of heat and drought, decimating hydroelectric power generation in the region and threatening a number of fisheries. Reduced flow and stifling temperatures also forced officials to shut down several nuclear power stations in order to prevent possible meltdowns.8 Melting glaciers in the Alps led to unprecedented avalanches and other risks at heavily touristed sites such as Chamonix, where the Aiguille du Midi, a famous climbing site, was closed to mountaineers for the first time in history. At Mont Blanc, thirty-eight alpinists were evacuated when a rockslide linked to melting ice cut off their route to safety.9 When storms hit areas desiccated by the heat, ensuing mudslides ensured the complete destruction of vulnerable landscapes.10 By 9 August, many of Paris’s city parks were closed because of an “unprecedented phenomenon”: drought- and heat-stricken trees were losing their limbs, and unpredictably falling branches posed a danger to the capital’s citizens seeking respite from the heat in the city’s limited green spaces.11

Not all of the news linked to the heat was bad. In the Ardèche and other wine-producing regions, the harvest came two to three weeks early. While the heat meant less fruit overall, it produced greater concentrations of sugar in each grape, resulting in outstanding wine.12 But devastation to the landscape and to the built environment greatly outweighed the heat’s few advantages. Warmer temperatures proved hospitable to new invasive agricultural pests, hitting farmers when they were already on their knees.13 The heat hit poultry farmers particularly hard: by 8 August, over a million chickens had died from the heat, presenting a public health disaster to those charged with disposing of their bodies.14 Meanwhile, temperatures hit 120°F (nearly 50°C) at Formula 1 tracks—and far hotter on the asphalt—presenting major dangers to drivers as their tires melted from the heat.15 On 6 August, TF1 recounted the story of a “nightmare journey”: as high temperatures melted catenary wires that supplied electricity to the national rail system, a high-speed train traveling from Paris to Hendaye in the southwest stalled overnight for six hours, stranding passengers in overheated train cars. The coming days brought more such incidents, including swelling and deviation of the rails as a consequence of the heat, with delays stranding thousands during one of the country’s busiest travel periods.

While much of the country vacationed, the heat began to raise a few alarms for health authorities. On 4 August, Météo-France issued what amounted to the first national warning with a posting to its website that noted that “every year around the world, heat, perhaps even more than cold, kills.” The website offered a number of guidelines for coping with the heat, advising the French to hydrate constantly, to cool off by spritzing the body with water, to cover windows with sheets soaked in water, to dress in light clothing and to eat light foods, and to frequent air-conditioned and other cool environments including green spaces.16 The next day, the department of Morbihan in northwestern France reported the country’s first official deaths linked to the heat wave. A local health worker noted that three unrelated middle-aged men—a cannery worker, a mason, and a municipal employee aged thirty-five, forty-five, and fifty-six, respectively—died of heat stroke. According to their treating physicians, all three were obese alcoholics, two with psychiatric histories and the third with a history of hypertension. Two died with body temperatures exceeding 107°F; the third with a temperature exceeding 104°F.

On 6 August, the official signaled the deaths to the Direction Générale de la Santé (DGS)—a division of the Ministry of Health charged with the administration of public health policy, health surveillance, and health security—which in turn directed the local official to the recently established Institut de Veille Sanitaire (InVS). The InVS, modeled in part on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, had been charged since its creation in 1998 with epidemiological surveillance and alerts throughout the country. Dr. Loïc Josseran, a physician working with the InVS, investigated the deaths the next day, concluding that “these deaths are certainly connected with the excessive heat of these past few days.” His report highlighted the men’s medical histories, and ended by asking whether a “national census of these deaths” might make sense “in these circumstances.”17

At the DGS, little was happening at this point. Lucien Abenhaïm, the head of the directorate who reported to the health minister, Jean-François Mattei, was on vacation; his replacement supervisor, William Dab, an English-trained epidemiologist, was about to depart. On 6 August, as he left on vacation, Dab sent an e-mail to the new acting head, Yves Coquin, warning that epidemiological history suggested that “we might anticipate some excess mortality linked to the heat wave. It would be useful for the DGS to prepare a press release reminding about some basic precautions, notably for newborns and the elderly. There are numerous studies on the health impact of heat waves.”18

By every indication, Coquin took the warning seriously. In the next two days, correspondence within the DGS and between the DGS and InVS suggests that he worked assiduously on producing an effective press release, and also pleaded with the InVS to begin a rigorous investigation of the links between heat, morbidity, and mortality in the country. Yet there were distractions that appeared more urgent. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease in Montpellier on 7–8 August took the spotlight away from the heat wave for several days, and high concentrations of ozone pollution linked to the anticyclone threatened to produce a number of health crises for asthmatic and other pulmonary patients throughout the country.

Moreover, the deaths in Morbihan were easy to explain away. Yes, they were clearly heat-related, but given the men’s medical histories, they were unsurprising given the intensity of the weather. The same went for a death reported in Paris on 7 August of a fifty-six-year-old man on his way home from work. Such cases appeared isolated, if not obvious examples of the sort of mortality one might expect during an unprecedented heat wave. When several more reports came into the agency on Friday, 8 August, they were even clearer cases of the types of deaths to be expected during heat waves. Dr. Marc Verny wrote to Coquin about the deaths of two of his geriatric patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in P...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Stories, Suffering, and the State: The Heat Wave and Narratives of Disaster
• 2 Anecdotal Life: Isolation, Vulnerability, and Social Marginalization
• 3 Place Matters: Mortality, Space, and Urban Form
• 4 Vulnerability and the Political Imagination: Constructing Old Age in Postwar France
• 5 Counting the Dead: Risk and the Limits of Epidemiology
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index