Emergency services in the city of Hull, in northeast England, worked for more than three hours to try to rescue the man, believed to be in his 20s, after his foot became trapped while he was apparently trying to clear a drain.

Firefighters were unable to free his foot as the water inexorably rose.

Elsewhere in the country rivers broke their banks, flooding roads and homes from Devon in south-west England, to Yorkshire in the north.

The Environment Agency, which monitors weather risks nationwide, issued four severe flood warnings and 21 standard flood warnings amid forecasts that some places would receive a normal month's rain in just 24 hours.

But conditions were radically different in southern and eastern Europe and in the Mediterranean.

Helicopters and specially adapted aircraft joined firefighters on the ground in southern Italy to fight a series of fires in Calabria and on the island of Sicily, as a heatwave there continued.

The situation was particularly serious in Sicily, where according to media reports guests at a number of hotels near the northwest coast had to be evacuated.

The fires were being fanned by the strong southerly winds known as the sirocco.

A heatwave in Greece killed two pensioners at the weekend and pushed demand for electricity to new all-time highs, officials and news reports said.

Hospitals around the country have been placed on alert and municipalities are keeping cooled public facilities open for those without air-conditioning at home, but heatstroke already claimed the lives of an 84-year-old woman in the western town of Egio and a 76-year-old man in Farsala, central Greece.

Temperatures were expected to reach 43 degrees Celsius (109.4 Fahrenheit) in some areas on Monday and will remain around that level during the week, the Greek weather service (EMY) said.

On the island of Cyprus a 72-year-old woman died of heatstroke on Monday as the holiday island sizzled in temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit).

The Mediterranean island is famed for its year-long sunshine but temperatures of 42 degrees now being recorded in the capital are extreme.

In Romania the capital Bucharest and eight southern districts were placed on orange alerts as the temperature headed above 40 degrees Celsius.

The heatwave that has already lasted several days has taken at least 25 lives.

First aid tents have been erected in many cities while ambulance services have received thousands of calls.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.