Fires blaze as UK heat records fall
Britain passes 40C as deadly heatwave scorches Europe
After a day when runways melted, railway lines buckled and even lidos were out of bounds, weather forecasters delivered the news some people will be dreading: today will be even hotter.
Some regions of the UK experienced their highest temperatures on record yesterday as the heatwave caused major disruption to travel, schools, hospitals and workplaces in much of the country.
For the first time, Britain experienced 40C heat yesterday, with some estimates suggesting it could be as hot as 43C today.
Britain shattered its record for highest temperature ever registered yesterday amid a heatwave that has seared swathes of Europe, as the UK’S national weather forecaster said such highs are now a fact of life in a country ill-prepared for such extremes.
The typically temperate nation was just the latest to be walloped by unusually hot, dry weather that has triggered wildfires from Portugal to the Balkans and led to hundreds of heat-related deaths. Images of flames racing toward a French beach and Britons sweltering — even at the seaside — have driven home concerns about climate change.
The UK Met Office weather agency registered a provisional reading of 40.3C at Coningsby in eastern England — breaking the record set just hours earlier. Before yesterday, the highest temperature recorded in Britain was 38.7C, set in 2019. By later that afternoon, 29 places in the UK had broken the record.
As the nation watched with a
combination of horror and fascination, Met Office chief scientist Stephen Belcher said such temperatures in Britain were “virtually impossible” without humandriven climate change.
He warned that “we could see temperatures like this every three years” without serious action on carbon emissions.
The sweltering weather has disrupted travel, healthcare and schools. Many homes, small businesses and even public buildings,
including hospitals, in Britain don’t have air conditioning, a reflection of how unusual such heat is in the country better known for rain and mild temperatures.
The intense heat since Tuesday has damaged the runway at London’s Luton Airport, forcing it to shut for several hours, and warped a main road in eastern England, leaving it looking like a “skatepark”, police said. Major train stations were shut or nearempty yesterday, as trains were cancelled or ran at low speeds out of
concern rails could buckle.
London faced what Mayor Sadiq Khan called a “huge surge” in fires because of the heat. The London Fire Brigade listed 10 major blazes it was fighting across the city yesterday, half of them grass fires. Images showed several houses engulfed in flames as smoke billowed from burning fields in Wennington, a village on the eastern outskirts of London.
A huge chunk of England, from London in the south to Manchester and Leeds in the north, remained under the country’s first “red” warning for extreme heat yesterday, meaning there is danger of death even for healthy people.
Such dangers could be seen in Britain and across Europe. At least six people were reported to have drowned while trying to cool off in
rivers, lakes and reservoirs across the UK. In Spain and neighbouring Portugal, close to a thousand heatrelated deaths have been reported.
Climate experts warn global warming has increased the frequency of extreme weather events, with
studies showing that the likelihood of temperatures in the UK reaching 40C is now 10 times higher than in the preindustrial era.
Extreme heat baked other parts of Europe, too. In Paris, the thermometer in the French capital’s oldest weather station – opened in 1873 – topped 40C for just the third time. The 40.5C measured there by weather service Meteo-france yesterday was the station’s second-highest reading ever, topped only by a blistering 42.6C in July 2019.
In the Gironde region of southwestern France, ferocious wildfires continued to spread through tinderdry pines forests, frustrating firefighting efforts by more than 2000 firefighters and water-bombing planes.
In Greece, a large forest fire broke out northeast of Athens, fanned by high winds.
Fire Service officials said nine firefighting aircraft and four helicopters were deployed to try to stop the flames from reaching inhabited areas on the slopes of Mount Penteli, about 25km northeast of the capital. Smoke from the fire blanketed part of the city’s skyline.
But weather forecasts offered some consolation, with temperatures expected to ease along the Atlantic seaboard today and the possibility of rains rolling in late in the day. —AP