Isabelle Dubois-Costes, a spokesperson for General Funeral Services, the country’s largest undertaker, announced the 15,000 figure September 9, basing her estimate on the increase in funerals over the previous year. The company first revealed the true scope of the disaster in August by estimating 10,000 deaths at a time when the government was claiming no more than 3,000. Government officials have since released an official count of 11,435, but promise “final figures” later this month.

Jean-Francois Mattei, the minister of health in France’s conservative coalition government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, admitted September 11 that the government made no preparation for the heat wave’s impact. “There was neither a true alert in the sense of an alarm being given nor was there any advance preparation,” he told a parliamentary inquiry.

The government initially downplayed reports of the disaster and waited days before taking emergency action. Air-conditioned tents and refrigerated trucks were pressed into service as the bodies overflowed morgues and hospitals. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Raffarin blamed “society” in general for the abandonment of the elderly.

Speaking before the parliamentary inquiry, Mattei recounted his meeting in August with scientists at Atlanta’s U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The center deemed the exceptional temperatures, which stayed at 104 degrees Fahrenheit for days on end, a “natural disaster,” he said. “They told me that a heat wave such as the one France experienced from August 2 to 4 has not been seen in the northern hemisphere for a century.”

A few days earlier, an official report cited by Agence France-Presse placed the blame on “administrative confusion and the large numbers of doctors away on leave”—a charge leveled earlier by government spokespeople.

The deaths have put a spotlight on the decline in the French health-care system and other government-provided services resulting from cutbacks by both the current government and its Socialist Party-led predecessor.

Meanwhile, the Italian health ministry reported September 11 that at least 4,175 more people older than 65 died during the heat wave there than in the same period a year ago—a 14 percent increase. The British government reported an additional 907 deaths by mid-August. In the Netherlands, the official figure for the whole month was up to 1,400 deaths higher.  
 
 
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