In less than two weeks in 2003, fifteen thousand people in France died as a direct result of the heat wave. Nearly a thousand lived in central Paris. Many of the victims lived alone, in top-floor garrets, or attic apartments, where the heat built up beneath zinc roofs and literally cooked people as if they were in an oven. It took weeks for all the bodies to be recovered. Entire apartment buildings had to be evacuated because of the pervasive smell of death.
