HASSELT, Belgium — 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 at least 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.
“We were dancing away and it (the shelter) caved in in the middle and people were screaming and running away,” one sodden young woman told Associated Press Television News.
Organizers canceled the annual Pukkelpop festival near Hasselt, 50 miles (80 kilometers) east of Brussels and pressed fleets of buses and trains into service to send the 60,000 festival goers home.
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.
Video showed panicked concertgoers crawling out from under the downed tents and running through fields of mud looking for shelter.
“There are still three patients in critical condition fighting for their lives,” Dr. Pascal Vranckx of Jessa Hospital in Hasselt told reporters. He said many of the injured were hit on the head by flying or falling debris.
After the storm, thousands of mud-splattered young people, many of them shoeless, trekked down the avenue from the festival to train and bus stations in Hasselt. Many had stayed on in the camping ground in the vain hope that the performances would continue on Friday.
At a news conference Friday, Hasselt officials and festival organizers described weather conditions at the event’s opening day as exceptional. They said weather forecasters had not predicted a storm of that intensity.
The Belgian weather service refused to give the speed of the wind, saying only that the storm was “violent.”
Chokri Mahassine, the 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. He said he canceled the event “out of respect for the victims, their relatives and friends we felt that the concert could not continue.”
“This is the blackest day that any Belgian festival has experienced,” Mahassine said.
Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme offered condolences to the families of the victims and said authorities would continue to help caring for the injured.
The three-day festival’s lineup featured internationally known acts, including Foo Fighters, Eminem and The Offspring.
“Our hearts go out to everyone affected by the tragic events at Pukkelpop,” the Foo Fighters, whose Thursday night show was canceled after the storm hit, said in a Twitter message.
“My heart goes out to those kids who came to see their favourite bands & ended up losing their lives and getting hurt, so sad right now,” Skin, the lead singer of Skunk Anansie, which was performing on the main stage when the storm hit, tweeted in the early hours of Friday.
“This is not how it should be. Oof,” tweeted the Fleet Foxes, who had also been set to play Thursday night. Earlier, the band used Twitter to assure their family and fans they and their crew were all save.
Damien Poinen, an 18-year old Belgian, was one of the many people who camped on the festival grounds in the hope that the performances would continue.
“On the one side (canceling the festival) was the right thing to do. On the other side, some still wanted to party,” he said. “Considering the people who died here yesterday, I was not going to stay anyway.”
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.