It’s been a nasty year for the safety of live music-goers, with 20 injured in a stage collapse at a Swedish festival; one dead and two injured from ‘legal highs’ at a Scottish festival and more recently, the tragic Radiohead stage collapse in Canada.
The most recent incident involves more than 50 attendees at a music festival in Germany who were injured by a single lightning bolt from a violent storm this week.
Loudwire reports that With Full Force, the heavy metal music festival held in Roitzschjora, Germany, saw horrible weather brewing through its early morning sets, with one particular bolt of lightning striking the gathered crowd of music fans, sending audience members flying. Injuring 51 people at the open-air concert and leaving three punters hospitalised in intensive care.
With a line-up featuring the likes of metal heavyweights: Machine Head, Soulfly, Children of Bodom and Cannibal Corpse and more; the torrential weather and the violent lightning came during the 3am slot of local act, Heaven Shall Burn.
According to German website Spiegel.de, “the first showers, heavy as they were, provided just an inkling of what was to come.” Going on to describe that, “just before 2 a.m., the next black cloud parked over the stage. And the lightning it unloaded resulted in 51 injuries, three of them landing in the intensive care unit of a nearby hospital. Witnesses say that the lightning strikes sent some people flying through the air — and left behind a wasteland of destroyed tents, panicked guests and a venue flooded with mud and deep puddles.”
Emergency services on the scene spent several hours treating the injured, while members of the crowd took refuge in a nearby drinks bar at the festival site. The lightning storm was part of some violent weather that had been brewing in the area during the week. Including three women who were killed by a lightning bolt the day before while out playing golf.
