Most of the 183 victims of Poland's cold snap were men in their 40s who died of hypothermia after drinking heavily and going to sleep in the open. A quarter of them were vagrants who slept in doorways and on stairwells.

Meanwhile residents in Belgium, Britain, Germany and Portugal were preparing for heavy flooding as water levels rose.

Britain was on high flood alert as heavy rain pounded large parts of the country, hampering rail transport and worrying homeowners in vulnerable areas following weeks of almost uninterrupted downpours.

With sodden ground and rivers reaching the tops of their banks after a wet start to the new year, officials feared a repeat of the floods that hit Britain in October 2000 which claimed 19 lives and left one billion pounds of damage.

No less than 399 general flood warnings were in effect across England and Wales, including 21 in the southeastern countries of Sussex, Kent and Hampshire.

"There could be flash floods almost anywhere," said Ray Kemp, a spokesman for the British environmental ministry, as a band of heavy rain swept across the southeast.

"The rivers are right up to the tops of the banks and they just cannot take any more," he said.

"This amount of rain coming through cannot get into the rivers -- and the only place it can go is into people's homes."

Very few houses had been flooded by Friday and no casualties reported, but the authorities warned those in vulnerable areas that flooding was "almost inevitable".

In central and northern Portugal, flooding damaged dozens of homes and destroyed two bridges.

Firefighters helped residents of the riverfront area of the central town of Agueda to evacuate their homes after floodwaters reached 1.5 metres (five feet) in some areas.

The railway line between Lisbon and Oporto was closed with 300 kilometres (200 miles) of track under water.

In Germany, a thawing of ice led to increased river levels leading the authorities to limit traffic flow near rivers.

Near the southwestern Moselle and Sarre rivers, traffic was totally banned.

Incessant rain also swelled watercourses in Bavaria and Cologne while several campsites and car parks on the banks of the Rhine were waterlogged.

Eastern Germany was not spared, with some roads closed in Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia.

The situation was also critical in Belgium amid more pessimistic weather forecasts.

Belgian media reports said a woman had gone missing while riding her bike near a river in the centre of the country.

Rescuers were also trying to find another woman who fell into a river during a violent rain storm in the northwest of the country on Sunday.

Belgium has been lashed by rain for several days, causing several rivers to swell and burst their banks, notably in the northwest and southwest of the country.

Dozens of houses were hit by floodwaters, despite sandbags mounted by emergency services.

After a brief pause the rain began to fall again in earnest across Belgium on Wednesday, and people living near rivers now fear more rivers will burst their banks and flood their homes.

In France, hit by violent winds on Thursday, one man was gravely injured when a tree fell on his car in the east of the country, while strong rain in recent days provoked flooding in Lower Normandy.and Picardy in the north.

In Alsace in the northeast emergency servies were called out 800 times to dead with damage from high winds.

SPACE.WIRE