Storms flooded cellars and streets in several regions of Germany on Thursday.

Parts of North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg were particularly affected.

In the evening there were still severe weather warnings from the German Weather Service (DWD) of severe thunderstorms with heavy rain and hail in parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg.

In addition to the flooding of cellars and streets, damage from hailstorms and local lightning damage can be expected, said the DWD in Offenbach.

In the Ruhr area, Autobahn 42 near Herne was flooded.

Numerous cars got stuck in the water between the Herne junction and the Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck exit, the control center of the motorway police said on Thursday evening.

The section of the route has been closed.

The police and fire brigade are among other things on duty with pumps to monitor the situation and, if necessary, to take care of those stuck.

Two dead from a falling tree in the Czech Republic

The fire brigade control center in Herne spoke of more than 50 missions in the evening.

130 people are deployed.

According to the information, numerous cellars were full and several large exit roads were flooded.

In the neighboring city of Bochum, the fire brigade also had to move out for storm-related operations.

Twice lightning had struck trees there that threatened to topple over.

In the town of Fröndenberg an der Ruhr, which was badly hit by floods a few days ago, several cellars were again full.

During thunderstorms, several cellars in Eastern Bavaria were full and trees fell on streets on Thursday.

According to information from the integrated control center in Passau, the emergency services in the surrounding districts had been deployed 122 times for severe weather missions by early evening.

Emergency calls were most frequently received from the Rottal-Inn district (66).

It was mostly about water damage, said a spokesman.

In Baden-Württemberg, too, heavy rain sometimes led to chaos and traffic delays. According to a city spokeswoman, many cellars in Kraichtal in the Karlsruhe district were full, several streets were flooded and partly covered with mud. Within a few minutes it was raining so hard that the water could no longer run off.

In the Czech Republic, two people died in a storm when a tree fell on their car. The driver had no chance to react in time, the police said on Thursday evening. Two children in the back seat were injured and taken to the hospital. The accident occurred near the South Bohemian town of Pisek, almost 90 kilometers south of Prague. According to the police, the dead were strangers who had offered to drive the children home in the storm. The parents who continued on foot were unharmed.

In the south-west of the Czech Republic, the fire brigades went out on dozens of missions in the evening to clear fallen trees from streets and empty basements that had filled with rainwater. Operations had to be interrupted on several railway lines. Just two weeks ago, a tornado in the south-east of the Czech Republic killed six people, injured hundreds and damaged around 1,200 houses.