The organisers of the Pohoda music festival in western Slovakia have suspended this weekend’s event prematurely, after strong winds during a storm on Friday evening knocked down one of the big tents and damaged other festival tents, including food and drink stalls and some tents on the campsite. The step was announced on social media earlier today.
Slovak rescue services said that 15 people had suffered light injuries, and 14 of them were transported to hospitals in Trencin and Povazska Bystrica. The Slovak emergency medical services operations centre said before midnight that most of the injuries were head and arm injuries. The Czech Foreign Ministry said three Czechs were among the injured.
The festival began on Thursday and was due to end tonight. The organisers said that safety inspections of the festival buildings could take up to 24 hours, making it impossible to continue with the programme.
According to aktuality.sk, several hundred people were in the tent when it was knocked down by the storm. Paramedics and firefighters attended the scene and searched under the tarpaulin using a dog and a thermal imaging camera.
The server reported that Slovak police have launched a criminal prosecution on suspicion of general endangerment over the tent collapse. Slovak Interior Minister Matus Sutaj Estok welcomed the decision of the organisers to end the festival prematurely. However, he said it was important to establish whether the decision should have been taken sooner.
Storms in western and southern Slovakia also severely damaged energy and transport infrastructure. There is an emergency situation on the railway in the whole of southern Slovakia. “International EuroCity trains from Budapest and Prague are currently being diverted through Rajka,” the Slovak national railway carrier said. National passenger trains and express trains were replaced by buses.
In western Slovakia, storms interrupted the electricity supply to about 135,000 people, due to lightning strikes, fallen trees, and broken power poles, according to reports from Sme. A spokeswoman for the regional power distribution company said it was not yet clear whether power supplies would resume today.
The music festival at Trencin airport, where artists such as James Blake, Morcheeba, Black Pumas and Richard Muller were to perform, has a capacity of up to 30,000 visitors. A similar incident was seen at Pohoda in 2009, also with a tent collapsing due to strong winds. The accident then resulted in two deaths and several dozen injuries.
