62 departments now on orange alert for heatwaves or storms

The heat was overwhelming. After a day with temperatures exceeding 35°C at some Parisian Olympic sites, Météo-France maintained 40 departments in a large southern half of the country on orange alert for heatwaves on Wednesday, July 31. The alert was, however, lifted in Vendée. The agency also placed 24 departments on orange alert for thunderstorms, starting at 4 p.m. on Wednesday. The entire Ile-de-France region is affected.

The storm front announced Tuesday evening was also less active than feared. Météo-France also announced shortly after midnight the end of the orange warning for thunderstorms that it had decreed for the Ile-de-France and part of the center of the country. Locally, “We are still observing good electrical activity, gusts of wind around 70/80 km/h, a little hail, but this no longer requires an orange alert”the weather service estimated.

No outdoor Olympic events were cancelled due to the risk of thunderstorms on Tuesday, but following prefectural instructions, several towns in Seine-Saint-Denis announced the closure of their fan zones from 6 p.m. The Olympic cauldron located in the heart of the Tuileries Gardens in Paris and stormed by visitors, also did not take off on Tuesday evening, “due to adverse weather conditions”we could read on the site dedicated to him.

As for the men’s triathlon event, initially scheduled for Tuesday but postponed to Wednesday due to the water in the Seine still being too polluted after the heavy rains that fell on Friday and Saturday, possible storms in the evening or during the night will not “not have much effect on the quality of the water in the Seine”declared the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo.