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A youth watches as others leave following the announcement that the music festival would be |
Ten more people were seriously injured when late on Thursday two giant stages collapsed, whole trees were uprooted and hailstones “the size of golf balls” rained down on petrified youngsters, witnesses said.
Three of the injured were in critical condition, including two Dutch citizens.
Organisers promptly cancelled the sold-out three-day festival, thus calling a halt to planned performances by global names such as Eminem and the Foo Fighters.
King Albert II and Queen Paola cut short their holidays to rush to the site in northeast Belgium yesterday evening – as a refugee-like exodus of muddied, confused teenagers traipsed away from the nightmare.
The storm “cost the lives of five people”, all Belgian citizens, Hasselt Mayor Hilde Claes said.
In total 140 people had received medical treatment.
Claes said initial checks on emergency planning measures, which staff told AFP included “checking trees for their resistance to high winds, and testing the drainage system”, left officials confident they had done everything that could be expected of them given such freak conditions.
Youngsters among the sorrow-stained figures beginning long journeys home after sleepless nights in rain-soaked tents said no blame could be attached to the authorities.
Up to 65,000 people, mainly young, were thought to have been present at the outdoor Pukkelpop festival – already the scene of a suicide tragedy last year – when the storm hit on Thursday.
“I was under the party tent when it came crashing down, we had to run for our lives,” spiky-haired 17-year-old Matthias Vannievwenhuyze of western Flanders told AFP as smashed-up giant television screens and other debris still littered the site.
“Hailstones almost the size of golf balls were raining down on us, I saw one girl knocked flat out when they hit her on the head.
“People were panicking, and a few minutes later, I saw medics lift her on to a stretcher.
“When they put a blanket over her, I knew she was dead – I hate to admit it, but at that moment, you don’t think about other people’s losses, you only think about yourself.”
The local prosecutor has opened a preliminary enquiry into the tragedy, a move which a spokesman described as “normal when deaths are involved”.
Rosianne Verheyden at the royal meteorological institute said that the killer storm had arrived so fast that the organisers weren’t able to do much more and festival organiser Chokri Mahassine told a press conference that her team had used “the best materials for the podiums”.
News of the chaos, which spread rapidly via mobile phone footage on social networking sites, brought thousands of parents from around Belgium and the Netherlands flooding into the site.
“Parents were walking up and down the road at the main entrance shouting out the names of their children – the anguish on their faces was so emotional for me as a parent myself,” festival crew member Christel De Vries told AFP as the clean-up operation got underway yesterday.
Neighbouring homeowners and youths told AFP how doors were thrown wide open throughout the night, with phone access, hot drinks and clean showers offered to confused strangers.
A crisis centre was set up in a gymnasium in nearby Kiewit suburb to help those who have been lightly injured or were in shock.
Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme issued a statement offering his condolences to the families of the victims, and Brussels-based European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso also extended the EU’s condolences.
Last year, two tragedies occurred at the same event: a sound engineer died of a heart attack, and a rock singer, Charles Haddon, committed suicide by jumping from the top of a pylon after his group performed.
Last week in the United States, an eerily similar tragedy occurred at the Indiana State Fair, ferocious winds bringing down rigging and killing five and injuring 45 others.