Memories of the 2003 canicule

The weather we're predicted to have this week reminds me of our arrival in Saint-Aignan in 2003. Sixteen years ago, we flew into Paris from the U.S. on June 2 and spent five days in Rouen in Normandy. On June 7, we drove down to Saint-Aignan in our rented car to start cleaning our new house and yard. The place was a mess, and the grass in the yard was more than knee-high because the previous owner had canceled her gardening service when we became the new owners in late April. Having tall grass to deal with was not something we had thought about. It was really too hot to be doing the work of dealing with thoroughly cleaning the house and at the same time getting the yard under control.

Predicted temperatures in Saint-Aignan for the next two weeks — in ºC above, in ºF below.
Notice that I've added a temperature conversion table in the sidebar on the right.

So that June the weather was already extremely and abnormally hot in northern France. We had had outdoor lunches in Rouen and in Étretat up on the English channel. That's almost unheard of in damp, drizzly Normandy. We were wearing shorts and T-shirts. It was hot in Saint-Aignan too, and was going to get even hotter. We didn't expect that. All through June and July, we suffered from the heat. Remember, we had spent many years living through chilly, gray San Francisco "summers" before moving to France. (Mark Twain famously wrote that the coldest winter he had ever experienced was a month of August in San Francisco!)

Morning low temperatures in ºC recorded in France on Aug. 12, 2003.

Our low temperature this morning is about 19ºC — we would normally expect 12ºC.

This week's weather will be comparable to the weather we had in the first half of August 2003. The hottest day was August 12, with a high in Tours, for example, of 39.8ºC (103.8ºF). The low in Tours that day was 22.6ºC (72.7ºF). The weather station in the town of Romorantin, 20 miles east of us, recorded temperatures above 104ºF for six straight days around that time. Houses had time to heat up to uncomfortable levels, and mornings were much warmer than usual. Walt remembers that he actually suffered from the skin condition called "prickly heat" or "sweat rash" at the time. We had a rental car with no air-conditioning, and of course no AC in the house. On August 8, we bought and took possession of a little Peugeot 206 (we still have it) that did have good AC, so many days saw us put the dog in the car and go for long drives out in the countryside just to escape the unrelenting heat.

Afternoon high temperatures in France on August 12, 2003, during the canicule.

We'll see what today brings. Accuweather predicts 33ºC (91.4ºF).

Canicule means "dog days" — normally, canicules occur in July or August, so this one will be early and temperature records will fall. You can see from the charts I posted above that temperatures are predicted to be extraordinarily high by the end of the week. In August 2003, as many as 20,000 French people, mostly elderly, died from heat exhaustion and dehydration during the great heat wave. I'm now elderly, no matter how much I want to deny that reality, so I have to be careful. Drink lots of water, they say. Limit physical activity. Stay in the shade. And so on. We have a car with AC but still no in-house AC.