Paris imposed a ban on drinking alcohol in public places on Friday afternoon as Europe continued to grapple with a heatwave linked to hundreds of deaths, forest fires and the abrupt closure of events across the continent.
Restrictions in the French capital came into effect at midday as temperatures swelled to 36C, and will repeat over the weekend in a desperate bid to curb excess deaths.
Paris hit a June record of 40.9C on Wednesday and at least 55 people, many of them young, have drowned across the country since 18 June while trying to escape the heat, according to authorities.
The heatwave continues to strain hospitals, close roads and spark forest fires across Europe, including in Germany where firefighters were unable to tackle a blaze at a former tank range due to the presence of unexploded ordnance.
And firefighters in Spain were warning they were unprepared to deal with another summer of wildfires, as the heat dome pushed temperatures as much as 18C above their seasonal average.
Organisers of the Paris Pride March said police had ordered them to change the date of their event to avoid overwhelming response services already under pressure due to the heat.
They said they were thinking of moving the event to September, after Paris police said they would ban Saturday’s event if the organisers did not comply.
“We are reaching a saturation point in hospital facilities,” said Patrice Faure, the head of Paris police, adding that the ban on drinking alcohol in public was needed to stem increasing hospitalisations.
French health minister Stéphanie Rist said the Paris ambulance service was reporting four time more cardiac arrests than normal over a 24-hour period, with young people also affected.
Temperatures are peaking in France and Britain, where records for June have been broken. But in Italy, the heat was expected to intensify into the weekend, bringing the summer’s first readings of 40 degrees Celsius.
Five deaths were recorded across the country in a period of less than 24 hours on Wednesday, including a worker who collapsed while carrying out maintenance on a water infrastructure site in the Padua area.
An estimated 212 deaths have already been linked to the extreme heat in Spain, according to the Carlos III Health Institute in Madrid. Last year, 98 people died in the same four-day period, between 21 and 24 June.
A fire in Huesca, in the northeast of the country, ravaged more than 4,000 hectares of land and forced the evacuation of some 240 people on Thursday.
The fire had been contained by Friday, but residents were still returning to their homes only to collect personal belongings in convoys organised by the Guardia Civil this morning.
Firefighters in Castile and León warned that they were underprepared for another summer of wildfires, after some 140,000 hectares of land burned last year, killing at least five people.
Germany also weathered a forest fire on Friday, affecting a national park north of Berlin that previously served as a Soviet tank firing range.
Around 120 hectares were ablaze, but firefighters were unable to directly tackle the fire due to the presence of unexploded ordnance.
“There have been explosions, at least for a while,” a spokesperson for the district said. “It’s a heavily contaminated area with munitions, category 4.
“This means that active firefighting efforts are impossible, for the safety of the emergency personnel.”
The heatwave is being driven by a weather pattern known as an Omega block, which traps a bulging ball of hot air over regions for extended periods, with cooler weather on its fringes.
Scientists said the record-breaking heatwave would have been “virtually impossible” without human-caused climate change, which has made this week’s stiflingly hot night-time temperatures 100 times more likely than they would have been even two decades ago.
“Over the region studied, this heatwave is the most severe ever recorded,” the World Weather Attribution group of climate scientists said in their latest analysis.
