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Heat Death Toll Forces a Shocked France to Question
Itself
By JOHN TAGLIABUE, New York Times
August 20, 2003 PARIS, Aug. 20 — The neighbors knew that Monique Taupin, heavyset and about 70, breathed fitfully. So few were surprised when she took a taxi one Saturday early this month to a hospital near her home in Paris's 13th arrondissement. That evening she returned home from the hospital, understaffed because of August vacations and overcrowded thanks to the withering heat. On Sunday the police found her dead in the first-floor apartment where she lived alone; on Monday an overworked crew from the city removed the body. In a hotel in the 18th arrondissement, it was grislier. While most of the victims of France's blistering heat wave have been elderly, a 52-year-old man who made the hotel his home was found dead in his room. City workmen who arrived the next day were unable to remove the 280-pound corpse. Overworked undertakers finally picked it up, three days later. The staggering number of deaths in France is finally drawing the nation's attention to who died and how. The details lead not through some place decimated by an awful plague but through the brick and concrete of the nation's biggest cities. The government estimates that the heat killed perhaps 5,000 people. The largest undertaker, General Funeral Services, said today that the number could be more than twice that. The victims were generally found inside apartments or houses or hotels. In virtually every case, there was no air-conditioner. "Among the elderly, there's a lot of anonymity," said Bernard Mazeyrie, the managing director of OGF, the parent company of General Funeral Services. "Paris is a city with a lot of anonymity." Mr. Mazeyrie's company, a subsidiary of the largest American funeral home chain, Service Corporation International of Houston, has been so overwhelmed that 165 bodies lie in an immense refrigerated hall at Rungis, Paris's big fruit and vegetable market, awaiting funerals. Outside, weeping families clustered around parked cars this morning while waiting to enter an area, carpeted and with potted hemlocks, to make arrangements for the bodies of their loved ones. With temperatures exceeding 100 degrees, Mr. Mazeyrie said that "particularly elderly people, people living in hotels and alone, were the victims, often of cardiac arrest." Four of every five elderly victims, he estimated, "died because of the heat." Mr. Mazeyrie said many elderly people were left behind by vacationing families. Some, he said, informed of the death of relatives, postponed funerals, not to interrupt the Aug. 15 holiday weekend, and left the bodies in the refrigerated hall. Today 10 families came to Rungis to bury their dead; on Thursday and Friday about 50 more were expected to. The city sent out crews to gather up bodies, but the bodies were often so bloated and disfigured by the heat that firemen had to be called to do the work. Mr. Mazeyrie's company employs roughly 6,000 people in France, half of them in Paris, and brought workers from outlying regions to the capital to deal with the crisis. Some succumbed to the heat despite the best of care. On Monday Nicole Quentin buried her mother Suzanne, 92, who died well cared for a week earlier in a nursing home in Bonneuil, near Paris. "She told us not to worry," Ms. Quentin told the weekly Journal du Dimanche, saying she did not blame the nursing home, "that she could be in no better place than there." Yet only 9 percent of the 4.6 million people in France over 75 live in retirement homes, according to Health Ministry statistics. As a result many of the elderly victims were found dead in their homes. When firemen or funeral home employees arrived to remove the dead, they often said the apartments felt like ovens. Pascal Champvert, the president of the French umbrella organization of homes for the aged, said, `'One has the impression that only now France is discovering its elderly." He refused to blame families, saying in an interview with Le Monde that French society was responsible. "The government presents the problem as if the solution were private," he said, but the response had to be "collective, by means of taxes and contributions." General Funeral Services issued average mortality figures today and said it had registered 2,604 more deaths in the first three weeks of this month than in August in other years. Since it controls one-fourth the funeral service market, the company concluded that perhaps as many as 10,400 more deaths occurred this year. If the estimate proves true, said Dr. Patrick Pelloux, the president of the association of emergency room physicians, "this is a humanitarian catastrophe, a major crisis for our country." Government agencies studying the heat crisis are expected to issue a report within four weeks. In a statement, the government today urged "caution concerning various estimates and projections." The French surgeon general, Dr. Lucien Abenhaim, resigned on Monday, the sole political victim of the crisis so far. Today it was the turn of President Jacques Chirac, who was on vacation in Quebec for most of August, to take the heat. Mr. Chirac and the cabinet will review the crisis on Thursday. But the popular daily Le Parisien asked today why Mr. Chirac, who expressed consternation at the bombing on Tuesday of the United Nations compound in Baghdad, in which at least 16 died, was silent about the heat wave, which killed thousands. "To begin with, he will have to justify himself," the paper wrote. "What happened?" Copyright
© 2002 Global Action on Aging
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