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Events this week in the town of Crhov in Southern Moravia will be recorded in the history books as the worst week in the town's history. This and several other towns and villages in the region of Blansko were hit by sweeping floods, that caused millions of crowns of damage and claimed two lives. Experts say such floods occur just once in 250 years. At the same time, paradoxically, other places in Moravia are suffering from drought.

Five years ago, severe flooding hit North Moravia. The district of Hrusov - in the city of Ostrava - was particularly hard hit. Dozens of families - from both the majority Czech population and the Roma minority - were made homeless, and Hrusov's integrated community was destroyed. But as Rob Cameron reports in this week's edition of Spotlight, one man is trying to put that community back together again - in a brand new village called "Coexistence".

In July 1997 floods swept through the city of Ostrava in the east of the Czech Republic. The entire district of Hrusov was devastated, leaving dozens of Roma families homeless. At that time Kumar Vishwanathan, a young physics teacher from India, was working at a school about sixty kilometers away in Olomouc. In the wake of the floods he made an extraordinary decision that completely changed his life - to help the homeless Roma families by moving in with them into their emergency accommodation...

Following the devastating floods that struck Moravia in 1997, it became clear that the Czech Republic's emergency services desperately needed to co-ordinate their efforts. The new Integrated Emergency System seems to be the country's answer to that call. The new system will be unveiled on Saturday and earlier this week spoke with a senior member of the Prague Fire Brigade, Dalibor Gosman and began by asking him how the new system would work.

It's now three years since devastating floods hit the Czech Republic, killing some 50 people, sweeping away houses and leaving many people homeless. The catastrophe came as a great shock and opened a heated discussion on the country's already out-of-date emergency system. So with river levels rising after several weeks of rain, have the Czechs learnt their lesson? reports.