Wildfires raged in the south of France on Thursday after weeks of dry weather and record temperatures across the country, devastating large swaths of land.

The biggest fire spread in the Aude and Herault regions, where up to 800 firefighters and 150 vehicles were deployed to tackle the flames that ran over 900 hectares (2,200 acres), local authorities said.

A powerful storm struck Romania 's capital overnight into Wednesday, killing one person and causing flooding in 20 counties following an intense heatwave.

The torrential storm hit 60 localities, and emergency services pumped water from more than 350 houses and 100 streets, according to the General Inspectorate for Emergency Situations, or IGSU.

Ice. Urgently and in large quantities.

At a Paris-region hospital, emergency medics needed it to plunge patients into cold-water baths to speedily bring down their temperatures so they wouldn't join the growing tally of dead from a record-smashing heat wave. But lacking an ice-making machine, where to get it?

These unbearably hot and humid summer months that put millions of people across the globe at risk are typically made possible by phenomena known as heat domes.

Heat domes can make already-high temperatures even more extreme and prolonged, and they are worsening in severity and becoming more frequent as the planet warms.

Every few minutes, the mortuary owner's phone rings. Since a record-smashing heat wave started taking lives and storage space for bodies in Paris and beyond, the funeral directors and mourning families calling him mostly have the same question: Do you have room for one more?

With all 32 places in his cold room taken, Zouhaeir Hertelli reluctantly has to gently say "Non," over and over and over again.

Much of western Europe has been baking under a "heat dome" this week, with temperatures soaring above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) in many places.

The extreme conditions have come in June, earlier in the summer than is usual. Records are tumbling by day and by night. Add in the humidity and it's more tropical than temperate.

Millions of people across France woke up drenched in sweat on Tuesday after another night of scorching heat, with most of the population exposed to extreme and exceptional temperatures.

Temperatures will remain exceptionally high around the clock as the national weather service, Meteo France, placed 54 departments under a red heat wave alert.

Italy's health ministry declared a red heatwave alert in 15 cities including Milan and Rome on Tuesday and said the number would go up to 16 on Wednesday.

During a red alert -- the highest level -- the ministry advises people to eat light, stay indoors in the hottest parts of the day and sprinkle themselves with cool water.

Mexico, Kenya, Italy and other nations around the world are experiencing one to two more months of heat stress than they were several decades ago, new research published Monday says, and some areas even more so. Regions previously untouched by heat stress are now feeling it, too.

Extreme feels-like temperatures, heat stress days and tropical nights have all become dramatically more frequent, long and severe over the past six decades as the planet's warming intensifies — a result of the burning of fossil fuels coal, oil and gas — according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on Monday.

France gritted its teeth Monday for a week of record-busting temperatures, sweltering under a grueling heat wave that combines daytime highs above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and sleep-robbing sweaty nights.

The national weather service, Meteo France, said that most of the country — the largest in the European Union and second most populated — is entering what is described as a "plateau" of unrelenting heat-wave conditions that isn't forecast to start easing before Friday at the earliest.