In Greece, authorities said that the longest heatwave in the country's history had killed five people, but media put the toll at at least 10.

"The weather conditions have been unprecedented, we have never had a heat wave lasting for eight straight days," development ministry general secretary Nikos Stefanou told private Flash Radio.

Athens on Tuesday registered temperatures of up to 46.2 degrees Celsius (115.16 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest since recordings there began in 1955, the national weather service said.

The heat was expected to drop from Thursday, but Greek firefighters were already having to deal with a dozen forests blazes in different parts of the country.

In Romania, a 49-year-old man was killed when he was hit by a branch in a violent storm that lashed the south of the country overnight to Wednesday.

A scorching heatwave had already claimed 29 lives, and Tuesday was the hottest day of the year with temperatures topping 45 degrees Celsius in Bucharest.

The national meteorological centre in Bucharest said that temperatures were expected to become "more clement" from now on.

The toll in Turkey rose to three after a 57-year-old farmer and a 41-year-old labourer died of heart attacks linked to the ongoing heatwave, Anatolia news agency reported.

Officials said temperatures in the largest city Istanbul hit a seasonal record Wednesday of 43.1 degrees Celsius in the district of Sile, the highest figure since weather services began keeping records in 1929.

In Bulgaria, hospital sources said two people have died from the heat and over 50 people have collapsed in the streets of Sofia and Bulgaria's second biggest city of Plovdiv.

Temperatures there reached 43 degrees Celsius on Tuesday, the highest for a century, and across Bulgaria, energy consumption that day was 70 percent of what it is in winter, the national electricity firm said.

While the south was sweltering, Britain continued struggling to deal with torrential rains and flooding which have killed four people in recent days.

The fourth British death was confirmed overnight in Worcestershire, west-central England, where police found the body of a motorist whose car was swept away by floodwater, emergency services said.

Authorities in South Yorkshire were still monitoring a dam which is threatening to burst, forcing the evacuation of some 700 residents, although overall floodwater levels were reported to be receding across the country.

Parts of Britain, particularly the Yorkshire area of northern England, saw more than a month's rainfall in a day, and forecasters were predicting this month will be the wettest June since records began.

In Germany, winds gusting at more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) an hour disrupted maritime and rail traffic in the north of the country.

Nearly 440 tourists were forced to spend Tuesday night on the island of Helgoland in the North Sea, camping in schools, fire stations and hostels, a spokeswoman for the tourist office said.

A group of Austrian school children also spent the night in a gymnasium there, she said, adding that they were expected to be stuck even longer since "no boat will leave from Helgoland or travel to the island today."

Maritime traffic was expected to begin running again on Thursday, when meteorologists predicted weather conditions would improve.

Heavier than usual rains across southern Sweden caused several small dams to burst, flooding homes and industries and leading some 40 train cancellations on Wednesday.

The dramatic weather conditions across Europe, as well as flooding in Asia, prompted the United Nations' top disaster prevention official to call for better global preparedness to cope with the impact of climate change.

"We cannot wait to be taken by surprise, we know what is going to happen and we can prepare for it," said Salvano Briceno, director of the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction.

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.