http://www.iht.com/articles/105848.html
Monday, August 11,
2003
Britain breaks heat record
Compiled by Our Staff
From Dispatches AP, AFP, Reuters
LONDON - Britain experienced
its first recorded temperature
above 100 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday.
The temperature in
the shade at Heathrow Airport, just west of London,
hit 100.2 Fahrenheit, or 37.9 degrees Celsius, just before 3 p.m.,
the Met Office, Britain's government meteorological bureau, said.
The previous record
high was 98.8 Fahrenheit, or 37.1 degrees Celsius,
set in Cheltenham, central England, in August 1990. British temperature
statistics go back to the mid-1870's.
The record left bookmakers
facing a hefty payout after a flurry of bets
on the 100-degree mark being topped.
The betting company
William Hill said it faced a payout of £250,000,
or $402,500.
The sizzling heat,
which continued also on the Continent, drove
millions to the country's normally windswept beaches to soak up
the sun and roads were jammed with motorists trying to escape
the
capital.
Rail passengers faced
longer journeys after fears of buckled
tracks led to speed limits being imposed.
The heat brought violent
thunderstorms to parts of Northern and
Central England. Lightning struck a leisure center in Birmingham,
injuring 14 people.
In London, the world's
highest observation wheel, the London Eye,
stayed closed because the glass pods that lift visitors high above
the Thames River were too hot.
In the French Alps,
a police officer warned hikers about rock
avalanches along a popular route on Mont Blanc. Glacial ice is
melting, loosening rocks from the mountainside. On Saturday,
helicopters swooped into the area to evacuate 44 climbers in
danger, the police said.
In many countries,
notably Portugal and France, vast fires
have been fueled by more than a week of hot weather.
In Lisbon, firefighters
said Sunday that they had maintained
their control over a rash of wildfires that have killed 15 people
and caused nearly E1 billion, or $1.1 billion, in damage since
the end of July.
"The fires are
gradually giving in to the battle, although
there are still a few fronts to quell," the duty manager
of the National Firefighter and Civil Protection Service,
Antonio Vieira, told the private radio programmer TSF.
Vieira said there were
currently only two midsize wildfires
burning in Portugal, both of them in the south of the country.
In Castel Gandolfo,
Italy, Pope John Paul II urged people
to pray for rain Sunday and expressed worry about the
wildfires devouring much of the woodlands on the Continent.
"I invite all
to join in my prayers for the victims of this
calamity, and I exhort all to raise to the Lord fervent
entreaties so that he may grant the relief of rain to the
thirsty earth," the pontiff told a crowd in the courtyard
of his summer residence in the hills just outside of Rome.
Some 40 deaths, including
victims of the blazes, have been
blamed on the combination of weeks of drought and high
temperatures. (AFP, Reuters, AP)
