Much of France was set to experience temperatures of around 40C on Tuesday, after records were shattered on Monday
Forty people have drowned in France over the past days as they sought to cool down to escape record heat, the prime minister said on Tuesday, as a heatwave swept across much of Europe.
Speaking ahead of an emergency meeting on the heatwave, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu said: “A sad scourge when it comes to drownings, as the latest figures just reported to us show 40 deaths since June 18, most of them young people.”
Across France, people have been jumping into canals and rivers to cool off. French sports minister Marina Ferrari said she understood the urge to escape the heat but warned against swimming in unauthorized or dangerous areas.
It really depends on what you’re acclimated to. I lived on a farm throughout high school, so I got to build fence lines and pock crops all day long in triple digits (F) with over 90% humidity (my region is technically a rainforest).
But I was used to the weather; I grew up in it. I’m definitely not going to criticize anyone who hasn’t had to deal with it on a regular basis, especially when no one has AC.
You’re simply wrong about your own experience there.
At 90% humidity and 100 F the heat index is 176 F which is astronomical.
A heat index at 125 F is lethal to any human being eventually…at 176 F you’re dead in 15 minutes.
Either the temperature was lower, the humidity was lower.
Lots of people take the temperature high point they see and the humidity high point they see on the weather forecast and assume they happen at the same time. That’s generally not the case.
So people say “it was 100 degrees and 90% humidity”, when actually it was only 50% humidity at the hottest part of the day and something like 80 degrees when humidity was 90% in the evening.
Everyone’s guilty of this. They’ve experienced a really hot and humid day, they then tell the story with the 2 highest numbers because it felt really hot.
It’s an accidental embellishment and ultimately leads some people to die of heat stroke as “they’ve worked through worse” in their own mind when the warnings come in with numbers they think they’ve experienced before but haven’t in reality.