10,000 FRENCH HEAT DEATHS? I’ve found it hard to believe these numbers, but they seem fairly solid:

PARIS — Europe’s deadly heat wave claimed more than 2,000 lives in countries outside of France, where an estimated 10,000 have died, according to official reports. Italy, which had refused to release figures, bowed to public outcry over increased deaths and agreed yesterday to investigate the toll.

The Associated Press compiled reports from hospitals and local and national governments about the deaths from 18 countries. Outside France, the highest official estimates came from Portugal, with 1,300 deaths, and the Netherlands, with 500 to 1,000.

It’s hard for me to believe that the French government would exaggerate the toll, given what political dynamite this is likely to be. It’s a colossal tragedy — one-fifth of total (U.S.) Vietnam casualties, but in a couple of weeks instead of a couple of years.

I don’t have any good ideas on why things should be so bad — except that heat can be quite dangerous, especially if you’re not used to it, and when it continues day and night. We’ve seen that in some heat waves in the United States, but even Northern cities in America are better equipped to deal with heat than most cities in Europe. Air conditioning and iced drinks are quintessentially American because, well, we need ’em here. This story blames vacations:

Many of those who died were elderly people left alone at home by families taking holidays in the traditional vacation month of August, Raffarin said.

This seems a bit hard to swallow as the main cause for so many deaths.

UPDATE: Mark Steyn wonders why this isn’t a bigger political deal in France than it is.

Meanwhile reader John Nowak sends this from France:

I’m in kind of a weird position here; I’m an expat working in Puteaux outside of Paris and my godmother died in a heat wave last year in Queens.

Click “More” to read the rest. And here’s a column by Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, suggesting that energy conservation played a role. The anecdotal evidence in Nowak’s email would tend to support that, though I suspect that other factors were more important. [LATER: Merde in France has more, including a link to a Reuters story (in French) that says the death toll is even higher.]

Nowak’s email follows:

The article you linked to said the methodology used to calculate heat deaths was to subtract the number of expected deaths in a typical year from the total deaths. I think this methodology is flawed: all it does is attribute to one cause all the unexpected deaths of the season. Despite all reason to the contrary, this is very much a highball estimate — the heat deaths are almost certainly not that high. Of course, this is a matter of definition. Imagine someone dying of trauma because the doctor was delayed while helping a heat victim. Is this itself a “heat related” death? I’d call it more of an “inadequate response” death myself; but the methodology would make it “heat related.” It gets hot, tempers flare, people get into fights. Heat related?

This is my first summer in Paris, and while I’m assured that the weather doesn’t usually get this bad, I’m altogether amazed at how poorly designed every building I’ve been inside has been. The ventilated, air-conditioned places Americans take for granted simply do not seem to exist over here. I’m talking about relatively new construction, incidentally; older homes are possibly much worse. My apartment has no windows that can be opened — only patio doors. There is no conventional window to accept a standard window unit. I examined a stand-alone floor A/C, but noticed that there was no rating for its BTU or kcal output I could see on the package. I also noticed that although the sample unit was making a mighty racket, cranked to max, I was not able to notice any difference in the temperature in the air it was exhausting. I was in Chicago the week before the heat really hit Paris, and I wrote the following to my friends:

I had to turn the air conditioner down last night, because it was making my room too cold. I danced happily in my room, enjoying the sensation of being too cold on a warm day, my laughter echoing from the walls and ceiling. I will concede that Paris has nice taxi drivers; but when it comes to turning the seasons on their heads, North America rocks. We invented air conditioning; we invented ice (I mean, the global ice trade of the 19th Century. Really. Read Around the World in 80 Days where it is mentioned that Phileas Fogg cooled his drinks with ice shipped from New England) and Europe still lags us here.
Only a survivor of the [Name of company deleted] building in Puteaux where I work can truly appreciate this marvel. I will repeat it. Puissant are the Magical Window Cooling Boxes of North America. Despite laboring under the disadvantage of 110 volts, theirs is the victory.

If I were a cynic, I would suspect that European air conditioners are sold based on their power consumption. The easiest way to make sure an air conditioner has a low power consumption is to make it so weak it doesn’t actually do anything.

Anyway, my take is that Chirac’s claim that the deaths can be attributed to vacations is that it sounds reasonable, superficially.

Yes, it is reasonable that more family-level care was needed. It’s absurd to imagine that the police are responsible for knocking on the doors of each and every old person in Paris and asking if they’re okay. It is reasonable to get this level of care from your relatives.

The problem is, you don’t give this level of care until you know it’s needed. I lived in California while my Godmother was in New York. I knew the landlord was checking on her periodically. In fact, the landlord was trying to give her an A/C unit. I heard about this before she died, incidentally. The claim that heat mostly takes the old and batty is, unfortunately true. But who wants to think of their own relatives as old and batty?

I called her once a week. One week, she didn’t pick up; I assumed she was out with friends. A day or so later I found out she had died. If, prior to that, I had been as scared as I should have been, I would have called her twice a day. I would have pressured her to accept the air conditioner. When she didn’t respond, I could have called the landlord. I didn’t, but I should have.

People in France didn’t know how dangerous heat can be. People in Chicago didn’t know it either, until they lost around a thousand twenty years ago. I, personally, was living right next to an appalling humanitarian disaster without the slightest inkling it was happening, even though the daily bitch-fest at work turned into a daily bitch-about-the-weather-fest. If anything, the Parisians in general seemed even less aware there was a problem. I mentioned that I had spent the weekend drinking and someone actually asked if I was drinking beer.

Beer? During a heat wave? My godmother’s death probably rattled me more than I think, and it struck me as a very strange question.

So, France had a situation where most people were unaware there was a problem. Where the government fell down, and fell down badly, was that it made no attempt to let people know there was a problem. No public service announcements on radio or TV. No fliers in the subways. And the health ministry, I believe, even issued a report downplaying the situation while the corpses were filling the mortuaries.

Meanwhile, you’re off on vacation. The weather’s hot, but you’re on the beach. Worried about mom? Don’t be silly. Mom’s a tough old bat; remember how she refused to move in with us after Dad died? She’s got another decade in her, easy. It’s easy to kid yourself.

I’m not saying I’m responsible for my godmother’s death. I could have done more to prevent it. I’m not in any position to criticize the people on vacation when their parents died. They could have done more to prevent it. Chirac’s government is not responsible for this disaster. But they could have done more to prevent it. They could have let people know there was a real danger.

Any good disaster has more than one cause. People aren’t stupid; the obvious problems are predicted and tend not to happen. Disasters are complex, and a lot of things have to go wrong at once.

I don’t know about the statistics — I’d be surprised if the government were highballing the numbers, for obvious reasons, but I could be wrong about that.