ORLEANS, France: In nearly 25 years as a funeral director, Gautier Caton has never experienced anything like France's record-breaking late-June heatwave, when he rented five refrigerated containers to store bodies arriving at up to three times the normal rate. A fifth-generation undertaker who grew up with coffins stacked in his parents' garage, Caton joined the family firm just weeks after an infamous 2003 heatwave that contributed to nearly 15,000 excess deaths across France. But this year, in a first, his Orleans funeral homes took in four bodies from overstretched firms in Paris, two hours' drive away.
"The Paris region was hit extremely hard, they were in crisis," he said. "And then it spread to us in Orleans, where our funeral facilities became severely overcrowded. It hit us with full force."
