As heat waves grow longer, hotter, and more dangerous, some cities are doing something that sounds almost surreal: rehearsing for them.
In Paris, schoolchildren, firefighters, medics, and city officials are acting out what could happen if temperatures one day hit a staggering 122 degrees Fahrenheit (50 degrees Celsius), Grist reported.
The idea is simple but urgent. Instead of waiting for a deadly heat emergency to expose weak points, cities like Paris are using live drills and tabletop exercises to test hospitals, power grids, transit systems, schools, and public communication plans ahead of time.
Seventy children filed into a tunnel along the disused Petite Ceinture rail line, where they acted out heat-related emergencies, including dealing with spoiled food during a power outage and carbon monoxide poisoning from malfunctioning generators.
Around them, firefighters, first responders, city officials, and teachers had to decide who should be sent to which hospital and make other quick decisions that an unprecedented heat wave would force them to confront.
The high-profile "Paris at 50 degrees Celsius" exercise took place in October 2023 and involved more than 100 organizations.
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What began as simple rehearsals for city officials is now spreading to cities and residents across Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States.
Paris' drill, which cost about 200,000 euros ($236,000) and took 18 months to plan, was designed to help protect the city's 2 million residents from extreme heat that scientists say could become possible by the end of the century.
Scientists advising the city have said that kind of heat is increasingly plausible by 2100, and Europe is already being urged to prepare for several more degrees of warming.
Current models indicate that nearly 1.6 billion people across 1,000 cities could face dangerous heat conditions within about three decades.
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The World Health Organization has estimated that extreme heat contributes to about 500,000 deaths globally each year. Dangerous heat can trigger dehydration, heat stroke, and complications for older adults and people with heart or kidney disease.
One heat wave can quickly become a public health, community safety, and economic crisis all at once.
A city may have a heat plan on paper, but simulations can reveal whether buses can still run, doctors can get to hospitals, and emergency teams will have the tools to cool patients quickly.
"It was very important for us to show people that heat waves are not just something we see on the TV, but something that can happen soon, and that we need to improve what we're going to do," Pénélope Komitès, Paris deputy mayor in charge of resilience, told Grist.
"The objective was to anticipate all possible impacts of a heat dome across Paris, to consolidate the [preparedness] measures planned by the city in the event of an extreme heat wave, test new solutions … and identify new actions to be implemented," she explained.
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