HASSELT, Belgium (AP) — Young people screamed and fled in panic as a fierce thunderstorm shredded huge canvas tents and brought down metal scaffolding at an open-air festival in Belgium, killing five people.
Hasselt Mayor Hilde Claes said Friday that two more people had died, bringing the toll from Thursday night's disaster to five. About 140 were injured in the storm, 10 of them seriously, she said. All the dead were Belgians.
Organizers canceled the annual Pukkelpop festival near Hasselt, 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Brussels and sent the 60,000 festival goers home Friday in fleets of buses and trains.
The brief, violent thunderstorm toppled the poles of several concert tents and left them in tatters, flapping in the wind. It also downed several trees and the scaffolding for the main stage, where rows of concert lights swung wildly before crashing down.
Skin, the lead singer of Skunk Anansie, which was performing on the main stage when the storm hit, described the chaos on the band's Facebook page. He said “a burning hot sunny day turned into a mini-hurricane.”
“(A) tower fell onto our truck, we had to run for our lives mid-set as hail hit the stage and the wind began to tear it to pieces,” he wrote. “This was the scariest moment I have ever seen or felt in my 20 years of being an artist.”
Video showed panicked concertgoers crawling out from under the downed tents and running through fields of mud looking for shelter.
At a news conference Friday, Hasselt officials and festival organizers described weather conditions at the event's opening day as exceptional and said weather forecasters had not predicted a storm of that intensity.
The Belgian weather service refused to give the exact speed of the wind, saying only that the storm was “violent.”
Chokri Mahassine, organizer of the annual festival that was first held in 1985, said he had never seen anything like it. “I have seen many tropical storms, but this was unprecedented,” he told journalists.
This was the second deadly incident at an outdoor festival in a week. On Saturday, parts of a stage collapsed at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis, killing five people and injuring dozens, when winds of up to 70 mph (112 kph) hit the site.
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Gabriele Steinhauser, Slobodan Lekic and Robert Wielaard in Brussels, and Mike Corder in the Netherlands contributed to this report.
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