Europe’s record-breaking heatwave left around 68,000 households without electricity in northwestern France on Wednesday, authorities said, in the country’s first major power outage of the latest bout of extreme weather.
The outage, which involved a transformer on the electricity grid, was related to extreme temperatures and did not injure anyone, the prefecture in the coastal department of Finistere said in a statement.
The incident took place around 9:00 pm (1900 GMT) on Tuesday in the commune of Ergue-Gaberic near the city of Quimper in Brittany, the prefecture added.
While teams from French grid operators RTE and Enedis had worked through the night to fix the issue, power is not expected to be restored in full until the end of the day at the earliest.
Up to 106,000 clients of the French power network were left without power by late Tuesday, as the continent’s sweltering heatwave pushed the country into its hottest day ever.
