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Heat Death Toll Forces a Shocked France to Question Itself (JOHN TAGLIABUE, 8/20/03, NY Times)

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.

An entire nation that leaves its fathers and mothers to die while they treat themselves to vacations is barely civilized. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 20, 2003 5:38 PM