At least two people have died as violent thunderstorms struck France overnight following a prolonged heatwave.
The storms also left 53,000 households without power on Friday, French media and local grid operator Enedis said.
In Saint-Victurnien, in the ,central Haute-Vienne department, a woman died after a tree fell on her on Thursday evening, and in Dolomieu to the east a man was found burned to death late on Thursday in a workshop that caught fire after being struck by lightning, AFP reported on Friday.
Grid operator Enedis said on Friday that 53,000 households were left without power, with cuts affecting mainly the Auvergne Rhone-Alpes area in the Southeast and the Nouvelle Aquitaine in the Southwest.
Weather service Météo-France on Friday lifted the orange alert for thunderstorms in all the departments of Southeastern France that were previously affected, having earlier warned of large hailstones and gusts of wind from the Massif Central to the Alps.
The storm comes after a deadly heatwave struck France.
Deaths surged by nearly a third in France during the hottest week of a record heat wave last month, the country’s public health authority said, reporting at least 2,000 more deaths than in the previous week when temperatures were already climbing and filling emergency wards with heat victims.
In Paris, funeral service directors have said they’ve struggled to find places to store bodies before burial or cremation, with some mortuaries saying they were full and having to turn bodies away.
“Heat stress is often called the ‘silent killer’, and European homes, workplaces, and schools were not built for these temperatures,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on social media.
“Europe is the fastest-warming continent on Earth, heating at twice the global average. Right now 150 million people are living under extreme heat, hundreds have died, schools are shut, grids are buckling.”