As the Heat Eases, the Agencies Begin Counting Who Moved This Summer

GENEVA — The first cool front in eleven weeks came down over the Concordat's northern members this week, and with it the peculiar quiet in which counting can begin. All summer the relief bodies had been too busy sheltering people to number them; now, as the heat corridors slacken, Hearth Relief International and the Passage Trust have opened their ledgers side by side to do the arithmetic the season forbade. The early figures are provisional and, officials stress, unfinished — but they describe a movement larger than any single month suggested, a slow accumulation across June, July and August that no headline caught because no day set a record. "It did not arrive as a wave," said a Hearth coordinator in Geneva, spreading intake sheets across a folding table. "It arrived as a tide, and a tide is harder to see." The point of the tally, she added, is not alarm but planning: corridors to widen, towns to prepare, water to route before next summer asks again. The heat is breaking. The counting has only started.