Understanding the French 2003 Heat Wave Experience: Beyond the heat, a Multi-Layered Challenge

ABSTRACT

The 2003 heat wave killed nearly 15,000 people in France. It was a stealth killer. "We did not notice anything", as the Minister of Health declared to the Parliamentary Commission. It is of crucial importance to understand the keys to this collective failure, which has much in common with the Chicago experience in 1995 –the lessons of which had not been grasped nor learned.

A four-layered challenge explains the fiasco. The emergency challenge, which is not the realm of bureaucracies outside the "9/11" bodies. The crisis management challenge, largely documented since the 80s and the 90s, but still poorly known by most organisations, in France and elsewhere. The unconventional crisis challenge, emerging more and more today with "outside-of-the-box" scenarios – and for which very few are ready to prepare, in any country in the world. The "texture" challenge, when the whole fabric of our complex systems (rather than just some specific segment) is suddenly deeply affected — an entirely new front-line in the crisis world, which urges to switch from a mechanical or an architectural to a more "biological" approach to read, seize, and handle emerging csrises.

The 2003 heat fiasco compels us to prepare for far more than climate-related crises. It calls for a fresh and bold look at our crisis paradigms. As General Foch said: "Gunfire kills, but so do outdated visions".