France: Heat your heart out
2003-08-08 21:38
France - Authorities in the French Alps on Friday advised climbers and hikers against taking a key access route to Mont Blanc because of a growing risk of rock-falls caused by the current heatwave.
Warning signs were put up at the Eagle's Nest viewing point near the town of Saint-Gervais after a Macedonian climber was killed on Thursday on the way to a peak known as the Gouter.
"The exceptional climatic conditions have considerably increased the number of rock-falls," said Saint-Gervais mayor Jean-Marc Peillex. "We have decided to raise the alert level, but not to stop people going."
Experts in the Swiss Alps have already warned that the sun is melting ice at abnormally high altitudes, loosening the structure of the mountainside and contributing to an unusual death rate among climbers this summer.
With temperatures stuck in the upper 30's and showing no signs of falling before next week, the French were experiencing a period of summer heat unparallelled in more than 50 years.
Chicken run against time
A major chicken producer in the Yonne department of Burgundy, southeast of Paris, said 60 000 birds had died this week in the heat. "The heat is still on but luckily the death rate is going down because they are getting used to it," said Michel Delagneau of Ducs de Bourgogne farms.
The cities of Paris, Lyon, Dijon and Grenoble continued to impose speed restrictions on cars after ozone concentrations passed accepted limits. In the capital nearly 800 drivers have been fined since Monday, police said.
Tourists and natives alike flocked to places that could be relied on to be cool: cinemas, museums and department stores. In Paris the underground catacombs - which have a mean temperature of 15° - had to turn people away because of a quota of only 1 000 visitors a day.
Computer maintenance companies said they were being flooded with calls from people whose machines were failing to cope with the heat. "The biggest problem is freezing - when the screen just blocks and the cursor won't move," an employee of PC Diagnostic told Le Figaro newspaper.
In Paris the city hall said it was putting in place emergency measures to limit the risk of falling tree branches caused by the hot weather.
In the south of the country firefighters brought under control a forest fire which destroyed 1 500 hectares in the Lozere department, but a fire caused by lightning at Luceram in the Alpes-Maritimes department near the Italian border was continuing to blaze.