Montreal hopes plan will avert heat-wave deaths

Charlie Fidelman in the Montreal Gazette: A scorching heat wave killed 106 Montrealers in 2010, and one-third of them were mental-health patients. Last year, heat and humidity caused 10 fatalities over the summer, and many more illnesses and hospitalizations, said Richard Massé, head of public health at the Montreal Health and Social Services Agency.

Heat-related deaths are preventable, Massé noted. Given that climate change promises to bring longer, hotter summers, the agency Tuesday unveiled its prevention and protection strategy aimed at reducing heat-related health problems.

Montreal’s prevention plan is built on analysis of past hot spells including lessons learned from the unprecedented heat wave that hit Paris in 2003 and killed about 14,800 people. Many of the victims were elderly – 85 and older – with pre-existing health conditions.

Seniors, infants and children and those with chronic medical conditions are more prone to heat stress, Massé said. Some medication, for example for depression and heart disease, can accentuate the effects of heat, such as dehydration....

Montreal's skyline, shot by Dickbauch, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Forest fires flare north of Montreal

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse: Some 800 firefighters were dispatched on Thursday to Quebec's outback to combat more than a dozen forest fires raging north of Montreal, a provincial agency announced Most went to the Haute-Mauricie region 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of the Quebec metropolis to douse a dozen of the blazes.

Thick smoke swept over the Wemotaci native reservation, forcing more than 1,300 to evacuate their homes overnight. The village, however, was not threatened by flames and no one was injured.

…Four of the fires, some of them sparked by lightning, were out of control in exceptionally dry forests after a record heat wave in recent days, Marie-Louise Harvey, spokeswoman for Quebec's forest fire fighting agency, Sopfeu, earlier told public broadcaster Radio-Canada….