The European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the extreme heatwave sweeping across Europe, leaving staff sweltering.<\/p>\n
Staff received a midday text message stating: “BERL \u2014 URGENT \u2014 Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”<\/p>\n
The 13-storey building houses Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. While lower floors lost cooling, upper floors \u2014 including commissioners’ offices on floors eight and above \u2014 reportedly kept their AC running. One official called the situation “like feudalism,” while another described it as a “disgrace.”<\/p>\n
Belgium and much of Europe have been enduring record-breaking temperatures for the past week. The Commission had advised staff to avoid going outside during the hottest hours, drink water regularly and start work earlier \u2014 advice that angered employees in buildings without air-conditioning.<\/p>\n
The heatwave has reignited debate about Europe’s lack of air-conditioning, with only about one-fifth of households having AC. In Belgium, one-fifth of trains lack AC, forcing the national rail company to cancel many peak-hour services. The European Parliament also faced blackouts this week due to energy consumption from its cooling system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The European Commission’s Berlaymont headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":118922,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[104],"tags":[211,2574,210,174,33432,4007,33431,17428,33434,33433,33435,1736,33436,135,8313,33430,1827],"class_list":["post-118921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brussels","tag-belgium","tag-breaking-news","tag-brussels","tag-china","tag-english-daily","tag-finance","tag-free-newspaper","tag-headlines","tag-hong-kong-media","tag-hong-kong-news","tag-hong-kong-news-media","tag-latest-news","tag-sing-tao","tag-sports","tag-standard","tag-the-standard","tag-world"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@dk\/116835704164161073","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/dk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}