Scorching Weather Brings Damage and Death to Europe

FRANK BRUNI / NY Times 5aug03

ROME, Aug. 5 — Unusually high temperatures and a summer-long dearth of rain have wrought serious damage to crops and weather-related deaths throughout Europe, a continent of increasingly scorched earth.

In Portugal today, thousands of firefighters battled blazes that have, over the past week, destroyed more than 100,000 acres of woodland and killed at least 11 people.

source: The Weather Channel

Hundreds of other people, in both Portugal and adjacent areas of Spain, have been evacuated from their homes to be moved out of the fires' paths.

Hot, arid weather fanned the flames, and it left its mark in many other European countries and in many other ways.

Here in Italy, where anything beyond a squirt of rain is a memory so distant as to seem like a fantasy, farmers contemplated harvests of grapes, olives, peaches and apricots that might turn out to be 50 percent below usual.

Already, the prices of many fruits and vegetables have shot up by 20 percent, according to the Agriculture Ministry. Agricultural groups estimated the financial toll on Italian farmers to be about $6 billion so far.

France was suffering a similar drought, with similar consequences. Farmers in much of the country have had to observe alternate-day irrigation plans, lest the precious reserves of water available to them evaporate.

Ships plying the Danube River in Eastern Europe were carrying restricted loads so that they did not scrape bottom. Water levels in the river have declined so much that in Romania, dredgers deepened some channels so that ships could pass.

Britain canceled some trains on busy routes and imposed reduced, temporary speed limits on others to make sure that rails did not buckle in atypically intense temperatures that neared 95 degrees.

Beyond those formal adjustments and measurable effects was a widespread misery among residents and tourists, who baked, broiled and steamed as seldom before.

"I haven't seen heat like this in 70 years: my entire life," said Stefano Colvolino, a 70-year-old traffic policeman in Rome.

Mr. Colvolino said that while individual weeks in the past had been hotter, he had never encountered a three-month stretch, in this case starting in early May, so consistently stifling.

"It's totally impossible," he said as he stood, deeply tanned and visibly perspiring, near Campo de' Fiori late this afternoon. "I'm out on the streets four hours a day. They're the four worst hours of the day."

Mr. Colvolino was actually lucky: the mercury hit only 98.6 degrees at its peak in Rome today. In Florence, it hit 104 degrees.

"At this point, Italy has become a tropical country," said Gabriela Medei, who sells fruit in Campo de' Fiori.

Europe was looking and feeling like a tropical continent, and the sweaty sense of dislocation was audible and palpable. German officials publicly debated whether employees should be allowed to leave work, and retreat to cooler, less stressful environments.

Around the city of Bradenburg, in eastern Germany, officials were barring people from entering forests in an effort to prevent fires. The summer drought had contributed to 300 forest fires in that area this year, officials said.

In Britain, many of the heat-addled people who passed through Trafalgar Square turned its fountains into wading pools, a desperate recourse for desperate weather.

Reuters reported that penguins at the London Zoo were fed fish-flavored Popsicles, while sunscreen was slathered onto pigs at another zoo.

Power grids in many countries were under significant strain, as people in countries normally suspicious of air-conditioning suddenly jettisoned their reservations and embraced — or longed for — even a manufactured breeze.

In the northern Italian city of Genoa on Monday, employees at the city's Justice Department left their offices, which are not air-conditioned, to protest that fact.

Throughout Italy, the heavier use of air-conditioning and fans was contributing to a daily demand on electricity that was 2,000 megawatts higher than usual, and energy officials warned of blackouts if the situation did not improve.

"The problem is very serious, very grave," a spokesman for one of the country's largest energy providers said.

Here and elsewhere, public health officials urged elderly people in fragile health to stay cool, inasmuch as that was possible, and there were scattered reports throughout the Continent of deaths attributable to the heat.

Spain and Portugal have suffered the worst of it. In some areas of the Iberian Peninsula, temperatures over recent days have surpassed 110 degrees. Spanish officials said that the heat had been responsible for at least 12 deaths since Friday.

There were also forest fires in southern Spain, although not on the scale of Portugal, which declared a national disaster on Monday.

Portuguese officials were marshaling all the resources they could to battle the fires, which they said late today were beginning to be contained. They also appealed for help from N.A.T.O.

"We are facing an exceptional situation," Prime Minister José Durão Barroso of Portugal told reporters after an emergency cabinet meeting on Monday. "It's been brought about by absolutely exceptional weather conditions, so we have to respond with exceptional measures."