Welcome to modern-day France, where the government’s grand plans for the future have officially collided with the reality of a historic heatwave. This week, France managed to clock its highest temperatures on record, turning the entire country into a giant, un-airconditioned sweatbox. Out of a population of 67 million, a whopping 44 million people are currently trapped under a red alert as daytime temperatures blast past 40 degrees Celsius and refuse to cool down at night.

The absolute state of French infrastructure is on full display here. Thanks to decades of brilliant bureaucratic planning, the country’s housing stock is completely unprepared for actual summer weather. A new report from the housing NGO Fondation pour le Logement dropped a bomb of a stat: half of all French homes have zero protection against high temperatures, and 66 percent of the population is literally suffering inside their own living rooms.

The epicenter of this clown show is the high-density suburban concrete estates south of Paris, like Grigny and Ris-Orangis. Take a look at Samira, a 35-year-old former building caretaker living in a seventh-floor flat in Ris-Orangis. Her apartment has no insulation and no outside window shutters, meaning the sun cooks her home like a microwave all day. She’s getting two hours of sleep a night, feeling dizzy, and can’t even run her fan because she’s terrified of the electricity bills.

Meanwhile, her ten-year-old son, Issam, had his school shut down alongside 1,800 others across the country because the state can’t manage to keep classrooms cool. Issam’s top-floor classroom reached 40 degrees Celsius—at which point learning is cancelled and everyone just plays games. Over in the same neighborhood, 22-year-old Noah is out here getting only four hours of sleep a night because there is absolutely zero airflow in these concrete blocks.

But it’s not just the apartments that are failing. France’s legendary nuclear energy sector—which is supposed to be the pride of their grid—is taking a massive L. Because river temperatures are too high, they’ve had to cut nuclear power output because they can’t get enough cold water to cool the reactors. To make it even better, power cuts have knocked out electricity from Brittany to the south-east, meaning people can’t even use their fans or lower their electric blinds.

Over in the agricultural sector, the situation is pure chaos. Hundreds of thousands of chickens have literally cooked to death in the heat. The losses are so bad that the local carcass collection services are completely overwhelmed. It turns out that when you build an entire society without planning for basic weather spikes, everything falls apart at the exact same time.