Death during the celebration

The hail storm in Budapest last night began during the celebration of St. Istvan's day which is the national holiday in Hungary. As hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the bridges and river bank to watch the fireworks, all of a sudden a storm came out of nowhere and began felling trees. The people panicked which resulted in at least 3 deaths and hundreds of injuries. A couple of people disappeared, most likely in the Danube.

People have never seen anything like this before. Indeed, there was an eerie sensation to the whole event -- after all who would believe that having a storm of this magnitude exactly at the time of the national celebration was a coincidence. This sounded more like one of those action movies where the bad guys send a tsunami to the shore or generate a volcano eruption.

Make no mistake about it, the storm was huge. Windows on our street shattered and a few trees were knocked down -- during which time hail was coming down. Felt like a biblical disaster.

We immediately turned on the TV and only the HirTV was reporting the storm, everywhere else you had cartoons and the usual boring night program. Reports and discussion about the storm and its results came out in this mornings papers.