Climate threat Extreme weather in Europe

French Hospitals Await Next Heat Wave – Order Ice Machine

Several hospitals in the Paris area were overwhelmed by last week's extreme heat wave. Despite temperatures now often reaching well above 30 degrees Celsius in summers in France, neither the hospital facilities nor the healthcare staff were adequately prepared for the influx of patients, reports AP. The problems included a lack of air conditioning and the high risk of medication being destroyed by the heat.

Thousands of people sought treatment for heat-related ailments. To help people suffering from heatstroke, they needed to be quickly immersed in ice baths. But at the large Paris-Saclay hospital in the French capital, ice was hard to come by. The hospital had to buy ice from fast-food restaurants and grocery stores.

The hospital says it has now ordered its own ice machine and hopes it will be delivered before the next heat wave hits France.

- We thought we were ready. We actually weren't, says the hospital's operations manager Cédric Lussiez, who describes last week as "terrible"

Over a thousand Spaniards dead during the heat wave in June

The extreme heat of the past week has caused at least 1,028 more deaths in Spain than normal, according to the Spanish health institute Carlos III. The figure is more than double the corresponding figure for June last year, when 407 deaths were estimated to be heat-related, writes AFP.

The first half of the year was also the warmest ever recorded in the country, writes TT. The average temperature was 1.6 degrees above normal, according to the weather agency Aemet.