In France, a funeral home is overwhelmed as the heatwave's death toll rises

PARIS, June 30 - Undertaker Zouhaier Hertelli is receiving panicked calls from families, retirement homes, and even the police desperately trying to find space in refrigerated mortuary storage for people who died during the heatwave that has been gripping France.

There were at least 1,000 excess deaths from last Wednesday to Sunday, France's public health agency said, adding that the numbers were not final and were bound to increase.

Hertelli's funeral home in Orly, near Paris, has room to store 32 bodies in its cold storage room and all are occupied, Hertelli said, pointing to the compartments, each with a label with the name of the deceased, the date at which the body arrived at the funeral home and the temperature at which they are stored ahead of a burial or cremation.

"We're completely full," he said. "The rush really started on Wednesday, Thursday and the whole weekend, it was non-stop. At the weekend I received 150 calls, and had to say no to the 150 bodies."

Though temperatures have started to drop from record-high levels, they are still around 30 degrees Celsius in much of the country and are expected to increase again at the weekend, national weather forecaster Meteo-France said, adding that temperatures were set to remain high next week.

"Families are calling us, nursing homes are calling us, police stations are calling us, municipalities are calling us. We're being contacted by all of our colleagues in the funeral profession," Hertelli said.

'STATE OF COMPLETE PANIC'

"They're at their wits' end, they're in a state of complete panic. Imagine your father's or mother's body has begun to decompose and we're unable to take care of it, and we have no solution to offer them."

Hertelli has asked local authorities permission to use a refrigerated trailer to store more bodies, warning that burials and cremations were often delayed due to the higher-than-usual number of deaths, meaning that some bodies will have to stay in cold storage units longer than usual.

"Today, if you call a crematorium, the waiting time alone is already pushing appointments out to July 10," he said.

France's public health authority and doctors have pointed to an increase in the number of deaths in nursing homes but also of elderly people at home. They have appealed to people to keep an eye on elderly, isolated relatives and neighbours.

SOS Medecins doctor Sebastien Chopin said he feared the impact of a possible new heatwave next week on people who have already been weakened by the recent high temperatures.

He and his colleagues in Melun, south of Paris, signed eight death certificates in people's homes over four days at the height of the heatwave last week, four times as many as over the same four days last year. REUTERS