PARIS, Aug 4: Large parts of Europe continued to swelter on Monday under a record-breaking heat wave that has already caused deadly forest fires, a crisis for many farmers and dangerously high ozone levels.

Portugal declared a state of calamity as some 70 wildfires continued wreaking havoc around the country.

The government held an emergency session, declaring a state of public calamity which is lower than a state of emergency. The declaration of a state of calamity will make the affected regions eligible for European Union subsidies.

Flames continued threatening a number of villages mainly in central Portugal, where fires have killed nine people and injured dozens more over eight days.

Wildfires have destroyed 16,000 hectares of forest all over the country. Dozens of villages have been partly burned down and thousands of people evacuated.

Fires also raged in parts of southern and central Spain, where temperatures of more than 40 degrees Celsius were blamed for the deaths of at least seven people in recent days.

In France, fires which killed five people last week have been put out, but attention shifted to the deteriorating plight of livestock and cereal farmers whose livelihood is threatened by the drought now officially declared across more than half the country.

With 54 out of 98 departments restricting water usage, the government has stepped in to allow cattle and sheep to graze on land that is kept fallow under European Union rules and to subsidise the transport of feed from less-affected areas.

In France — but also in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Serbia, Spain and other countries — farmers were predicting a drastic fall in grain and milk yields.

The price of chicken has gone up by more than 35 percent in Spain, as a result of the heat which has killed more than a million birds and led to dramatic weight loss in the rest, the French newspaper Liberation reported.

In Britain forecasters were predicting that the country’s previous record of 37.1 degrees Celsius — reached at the English town of Cheltenham in August 1990 — could be topped midweek, as London joins Paris, Madrid and Lisbon with temperatures in the high 30s.

The national rail operator Network Rail ordered speed restrictions on some of the country’s busiest lines out of fears of tracks buckling in the heat. Trains running at 110 miles an hour will be forced to run at just over half that speed.

Meteorologists said the heat wave was caused by an anti-cyclone firmly anchored over the western European land mass, which is holding back the rain-bearing depressions that in normal years make inroads into the continent from the Atlantic ocean.

Opinions differ over whether it can also be attributed to longer-term climate change linked to the production of greenhouse gases.

The high temperatures were causing dangerous levels of ozone concentrations in several European cities — due to a chemical reaction with exhaust fumes — and in the Paris region, authorities ordered speed restrictions and reduced bus fares to try to reduce the pollution.

In Switzerland, the heat was being partially blamed for the large number of deaths this year in Alpine climbing accidents — 58 so far compared to 28 in the same period in 2002. Officials said the hot weather drew hikers higher into the mountains, while melting ice made large areas unstable.

In France, five nuclear reactors were operating at reduced capacity because the river water on which they depend for cooling was too warm and flowing too slowly — this at a time when demand for power is particularly strong because of air-conditioning usage.

Workers at the Fessenheim plant near the German border doused the reactor with water to keep the temperature within authorised limits, prompting calls from environmentalists for it to be shut down until the heat subsides.—AFP/dpa