Who France Can Find in a Heat Wave
When Parisians died in their sweltering apartments in August 2003, the people who first noticed were often neighbors, friends and building caretakers: a knock went unanswered, a phone kept ringing.
Afterward, France asked every town to keep a list of residents to check on during heat waves, and left it to people to sign up. This July, the government adopted rules to add names from home-care and disability benefit files unless people object. Twenty-three years of French records show who got listed. They say much less about who got reached.
Who France Can Find in a Heat Wave
When Parisians died in their sweltering apartments in August 2003, the people who first noticed were often neighbors, friends and building caretakers: a knock went unanswered, a phone kept ringing.
Afterward, France asked every town to keep a list of residents to check on during heat waves, and left it to people to sign up. This July, the government adopted rules to add names from home-care and disability benefit files unless people object. Twenty-three years of French records show who got listed. They say much less about who got reached.
Short Case Study
In 1972, mussel farmers and fishers gathered in the harbor at Burghsluis to fight a government plan to close the Oosterschelde, a tidal bay in the southwestern Netherlands, with a solid dam. The plan came after a 1953 flood killed many people there. The protesters' slogan was "Keep the Oosterschelde open." Photos survive. Their own words, in the records I could find, mostly don't.
On 20 November 1974, the Dutch parliament chose steel gates instead, left open except in severe storms. Nobody knew what weaker tides would do to the bay. The barrier opened in October 1986.
For the 40th anniversary, the national water agency, Rijkswaterstaat, published a look back saying safety and nature "can go hand in hand." Its own project pages show that the tidal flats, sand and mud that go under at high tide and dry out at low tide, have shrunk since 1986, because the slower currents return less sand than storms carry away. This year the agency is adding sand to one flat, the Galgeplaat, and replacing the gate machinery. The look back mentions neither.
Mrs. Fillmore Stayed While Galveston Rose Beneath Her. We Asked What It Cost.
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The Paycheck the 1927 Levee Promise Left Out
In April 1927 Louisiana dynamited a levee below New Orleans to lower the river past the city, and the governor's proclamation said the damage to property would be paid. Many claims were. A motor-company manager named Foret, out $75 a week while his flooded company stayed shut, asked for $2,625 in lost salary. In 1929 the state Supreme Court ruled on whether a paycheck counted as a loss. Judges kept citing the answer for years.
The Drought a Tax Judge Called Sudden
In 1977 a drought ordinance held a San Rafael family of four to 148 gallons of water a day. The hillside garden Norman and Betty Ruecker had fed through twelve irrigation systems was dead by June. They wrote it off on their taxes as a loss, and the IRS said a drought is too slow to count. In 1981 a federal judge disagreed. Behind their ration ran water trades reaching from Southern California to a pipe across the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge.
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