Paris.- A total of 28 departments of the hundred that exist in France are on orange alert this Saturday due to heat, with temperatures that can occasionally reach 39 degrees this afternoon in the lower course of the Rhône valley.
The meteorological services, which have activated this alert in a wide inland strip that goes from the foot of the Pyrenees to the Alps and the borders with Switzerland and Germany, highlight on their website that last night temperatures did not drop below 20 degrees. in many cities.
Thus at 5:00 in the morning, the thermometer marked 25 degrees in Bourgoin, 24 in Clermont Ferrand and Moulin, or 23 in Toulouse and Lyon.
Although the north of France is for the moment largely untouched by this heat wave, in Paris at the same time the temperature was 26 degrees, but by 11 it had dropped to 22 degrees thanks to a light rain.
Météo France expects that this afternoon the maximum will be between 34 and 38 degrees in large areas of the interior and the south: Jura, Auvergne, Rhône-Alpes, Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur (PACA) and Corsica, with somewhat higher peaks in the valley of Rhone.
On the night of this Saturday, the lows will remain around 20-23 degrees in those areas on orange alert, where temperatures will rise even more tomorrow, up to 35-38 degrees and may exceed 40 again in the valley of Rhône near its mouth in the Mediterranean.
The peak of this episode of heatwave in France, which “is announced as the hottest in the summer of 2023 and also as one of the latest with this intensity” – underlines Météo France – will arrive from Monday to Wednesday.
Temperatures should start to drop from Thursday, but that is yet to be confirmed.
In contrast to what happens in the interior and in the south of the country, on the coast of Normandy and Brittany (northwest), the maximum temperatures will not reach 25 degrees in the coming days.
This heat wave coincides with one of the busiest weekends on French roads, especially on the A7 (Lyon-Marseille), A9 (Orange-Spanish border) and A10 (Paris-Bordeaux) motorways.
The state electricity company EDF has warned that starting this weekend it could reduce the power of two of its nuclear power plants whose reactors are cooled with water from the Rhône (Tricastin and Bugey) because it drops to a temperature that reaches the thresholds that It has fixed to take that type of measurements, between 26 and 29 degrees.
