PARIS, June 26 -- Two children died after being left in a hot car outside Lyon. In southern Spain, the thermometer reached 45 degrees Celsius. Across a continent that was not built for this kind of heat, Europe's worst heatwave in more than twenty years is still expanding its death toll.

As of Wednesday, Spain's official mortality surveillance system, the MoMo network, estimated 212 deaths linked to the heat in just four days, from Sunday through Wednesday. France had recorded at least 40 drowning deaths, most of them young people who sought relief in rivers and unsupervised lakes, along with 18 deaths directly attributed to heat exposure. In the United Kingdom, Somerset recorded 36.4 degrees Celsius on Thursday, the highest June tempera...