A young man was killed near Louny, 65 kilometres (40 miles) from Prague, when a tree crashed onto his car, crushing it. Another person in the car sustained serious injuries and had to be hospitalised, police said.

Hundreds of trees were uprooted, and at least five people injured as the storms damaged buildings and cars in Klasterec-nad-Ohri, 100 kilometres from Prague.

The bad weather played havoc with the crops in the hop-growing region of Slany in central Bohemia, where the gathering season begins in a few days. About 50 villages in the area went without electricity on Friday morning as a result of outages.

The country suffered one of the worst floods in recent history exactly a year ago, when the flooding of the Vltava river claimed 18 lives and caused damage estimated at some 2.5 billion euros (2.8 billion dollars).

More than 200,000 people were evacuated from their homes, and several art treasures in museums and libraries destroyed in the flood's wake.

TERRA.WIRE