PARIS (AP) — Firefighters across Europe struggled against multiple fires Friday as a new wave of record-breaking heat baked a swath of the continent, their task further complicated by exceptionally parched landscapes.With France experiencing its driest year ever, a new fire raced through woodlands overnight in the Landes region on the southwest coast. The blaze forced more than 500 people to evacuate their homes in the town of Luglon as hundreds of firefighters deployed to the area, the regional administration said Friday.It’s one of several fires scorching forests around France this week, including in normally cooler and wetter regions in the north and Brittany. A historic fire devoured forests near Bordeaux last month and pushed a quarter of a million people from their homes.After the U.K. recorded its hottest day of the year on Thursday, firefighters spent Friday tackling fires across the West Midlands, in central England, that led to thousands of emergency calls and forced people to flee from burning homes. Nineteen people were hospitalized, the ambulance service said.The historic temperatures are linked to human-caused climate change, and are hitting countries more designed for long cold seasons and ill-equipped for this sort of heat, with limited air conditioning.Meanwhile, efforts to contain a wildfire in Germany were complicated by unexploded World War II munitions, and shifting winds in Croatia spread flames deeper into a coastal suburb and forced more than 1,000 people to flee.