Uprooted trees, power cables torn down, rainwater flooding the city’s streets and even subway stations, damaged buildings, traffic delays – these were the apocalyptic scenes brought on by yesterday’s extraordinary storm that put an end to several days of record heat, in some places as high as 40 °C, across the country.
In several Budapest districts, the power supply was breaking or temporarily cut off by the storm. Firefighters were called some 1600 times to locations around Budapest until 9 pm on Wednesday evening to react to emergencies caused by the storm, mainly to deal with trees and branches collapsed onto roads and plaster covering streets. Large quantities of water rolling on street surfaces also caused major delays in traffic.
There are still major delays in railway traffic to and from Budapest’s Keleti pályaudvar train station, where five tracks are temporarily out of service due to damage caused to the building by the storm, and hundreds of households across the city are still without electricity. Disaster relief personnel were alerted a total of 3500 times in the capital alone.
The storm also claimed a human life when a man was fatally struck by electricty due to water accumulated in the cellar of his house in Budapest’s District XIX. Another building in the capital collapsed, but nobody was injured in that incident.
via index.hu and szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu
photos: index.hu, MTI and Veronika Mag/szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu