"The figure of 5,000 was mentioned yesterday. It's one hypothesis. It's plausible but it's just a hypothesis," Health Minister Jean-Francois Mattei told RTL radio.

Mattei's comment came after a newspaper quoted unnamed officials on Sunday as saying an estimated 5,000 people had died in the heatwave, which ended at the weekend, dramatically increasing the previous official estimate of 3,000 deaths.

Mattei had initially rejected the report in the Journal de Dimanche weekly, during a news conference late on Sunday. But early on Monday he appeared to have changed his mind.

The health ministry has said more precise death figures will be known later this week.

In his interview with RTL, Mattei also acknowledged criticism from doctors and the political opposition that the disaster had not been adequately handled.

"We didn't have the information and the warning signals that we should have had," he said.

But he tried to deflect the anger directed at him by claiming he had only belatedly been made aware of the situation. "The health minister, who is before you now and who totally accepts his responsabilities, did not receive any warning signals," he said.

As temperatures soared to around 40 degrees Celsius (104 degree Farenheit) in the first two weeks of August and the bodies of heatwave victims -- most of them elderly -- overfilled morgues and hospitals, the government was increasingly criticised for being too slow to react.

The head of the administrative body that oversees the health system, Gilles Brucker, is reported in the forthcoming Tuesday issue of Le Monde newspaper as admitting there was "obviously ... a deficiency" in the way death tolls were reported.

"It isn't acceptable -- and in this we no doubt share some of the responsibility -- that the information in this area (hospital death tolls) was not shared immediately," he said.

"It isn't acceptable that people start to die in big numbers because of the heat without us, collectively, knowing about it so as to tackle the problem."

Brucker said hindsight showed that there should have been a public heatwave alert based on the weather forecasts but insisted that, at the time, neither the ambulance service nor the hospitals had raised the alarm.

He said his National Health Oversight Institute would now develop ways for compiling and announcing in real time information about health crises in France's biggest cities.

The left-wing newspaper Liberation mocked Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin's statement at the weekend that French society -- and not the state health system or the lack of government leadership -- was to blame for the high death toll because it abandoned its elderly people.

The paper said Raffarin was trying to shift blame but that this tactic "was also part of the government's inadequate response to the consequences of the heatwave and its tardiness in recognising there was a public health problem that required a rapid and broad reaction".

Raffarin's centre-right government had cut budgets for the care of the elderly and "the dramas of old age didn't seem to be a priority for him just a few weeks ago", Liberation said.

By Monday, the record high temperatures were a distant memory for most of the country.

But the weather continued to pose challenges to emergency services, with brief but brutal storms lashing the south and the east overnight.

At least two people was killed in the Alps -- a man who drowned when his small boat capsized on a lake and motorcyclist struck by a falling tree -- and certain railway lines were cut for several hours, officials said.

Tens of thousands of households were left without electricity in the Rhone-Alpes region after falling trees cut power lines, state power company EDF said.

There was also damage in neighbouring regions of Switzerland, particularly around Geneva, where trees were uprooted, roofs blown off and transport links blocked.

Several flights into and out of Geneva's Cointrin airport were delayed on Sunday and early Monday.

Forecasters said they expected the bad weather to abate later on Monday.

burs/rmb/gil

TERRA.WIRE