"Like Working In A Volcano" - Snapshots Of Europe's Heatwave [View all]

EDIT

In the searing heart of inland Sicily, Luigi Randazzo, 47, a sous-chef at a restaurant was plating a dish of mussels. “I was working next to the kettle, where the thermometer read 60 degrees,” he said. “The fryer was on. So was the oven. It felt like working inside a volcano.” While diners waited in the cool comfort of air conditioning, Randazzo moved from burner to burner in the kitchen, clad in a chef’s uniform soaked with sweat. “It felt like someone had thrown a bucket of water in my face,” he said. “We have an air conditioner in the kitchen, but it’s completely useless when all the machines are running.” In 2021, temperatures in Sicily hit a record 48.8C (119.8F). Randazzo works in the part of the island where the desert is slowly advancing across the countryside, and where, in the last six months of 2023, just 150mm of rain fell.

EDIT

Sven, 58, had felt the heat creep up over the last two weeks as he rewired a telecommunications box. By Tuesday afternoon, it had hit 33C, and would rise to a sweltering 37C the following day. “I’ve set this up to meet my needs,” he said from under a bright green umbrella. “I’ve got a coolbox, I avoid working under the blazing sun, and I put a cap on when it hits. Otherwise, it’s a case of not moving too fast.” German employees do not have a legal right to take time off work in the heat but bosses have a duty of care to their workers. This can mean setting up fans in offices or setting up shade on construction sites. “For me, the heat is normal,” said Sven, “but you do have to do things differently.”

EDIT

Built of cast iron and glass in 1866, a couple of decades before the Eiffel Tower, the Marché St Quentin is the largest covered food market in Paris. It was designed to be light and airy in all seasons, but not for 39.3C – which is what the nearby Lariboisière weather station recorded at 5pm on Tuesday. “It was inhumane, really brutal,” said Sahra Baadache, 27, one of the market’s three cheesemongers. “A sauna. A steam bath. St Quentin is basically a greenhouse and there’s no way of ventilating or cooling it down. It was 42C in here by mid-afternoon. People really suffered. Stallholders who live nearby were going home for cold showers.”

Cheese and heat do not mix; textures and flavours change irreversibly. Baadache did what she could to save her 150-odd varieties, bringing out only a small fraction of her stock and covering up her two refrigerated display cabinets to keep the cold in. “They survived, just,” she said. “But I was a wreck – sweating about my cheeses, and sat behind two fridge motors generating even more heat.” And, of course, there were no customers: “No one came. So it was like a double punishment.”

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/05/stories-from-six-countries-europe-extreme-heat