148 Years Ago This Weekend

148 years ago this weekend:

Two tragedies have dominated news in NZ this week. Mt Maunganui and Nepal.

But on 30 August 1878, a disaster with features of both modern events unfolded in Hungary..a reminder that climate extremes are often predictable in hindsight.

THE DESTRUCTION OF MISKOLCZ, 1878

Several districts in Hungary were visited by a terribly destructive thunderstorm on the night of Friday week. At Miskolcz more than 1000 houses were destroyed. Over 400 dead bodies have been recovered, and 200 persons were missing. The town of Erlau was also terribly devastated. The waters of the rivulet near Erlau broke through the walls of the town, and whole rows of houses were swept away and many persons killed.

The correspondent of the “Daily Telegraph,” writing on Tuesday, says the town of Miskolcz is one heap of ruins. What were once the streets and public squares are still bestrewn with disfigured corpses, although a whole regiment and the local fire brigade have been at work for the last two days. The remaining inhabitants are in deadly fear of a fresh disaster, the sky being still thickly overclouded.

One correspondent writes that words cannot depict the sight that met his eyes on arriving at Miskolcz. The once thrifty commercial town no longer exists. A pile of bricks and mortar now stands in its place. The survivors are almost without exception utterly ruined. The mischief was done, not by an ordinary flood, but by the instantaneous rupture of a colossal waterspout over the very heads of the population. The shock was terrific. Furniture was hurled in every direction. The houses reeled for a moment from their basements, and then came down with one tremendous crash.

In the village of Mad the greatest damage seems to have been done by the flood that followed the breaking of the waterspout. Huge masses of water were suddenly seen rushing down the sides of the hills behind the village, like lava vomited by a volcano. The panic-stricken inhabitants fled in wild disorder, many of them to meet with death a few yards beyond their thresholds. Forty houses were completely destroyed, and the rest all more or less damaged. The total number of victims is not yet known. The Emperor has sent an aide-de-camp with 5000fl. to relieve the most urgent cases. - Christchurch Press, 1878

Reformed pastor Sámuel Gyöngyösy wrote this:

"The thirtieth of August was not much different from other summer days; the dense and electric air had a suffocating effect on the body and a chilling effect on the mood; the great heat suggested, at best, a heavy downpour or a celestial war.

Midnight approached, and after eleven o'clock, like a distress shot from a sinking ship, the stimulating cannon of the thick clouds roared; dully, growling, with outstretched black wings, the angel of destruction approached - in the fire of lightning that succeeded each other every moment, one might have thought that the whole atmosphere was on fire.

(...)

The storm passed after midnight, the roaring subsided, the torches in the sky went out, and only distant, fading lights were now and then reflected back into the pitch-black sky, which stretched horribly over the sleeping city. The people, giving thanks to God, calmed down again.

(..Miskolcz (..) is such an unfortunate city that, not counting the smaller valley openings nearby, the waters of three larger valleys rushing down from the mountains merge at its borders, which, during such a large-scale downpour, immediately fill the Szinva and Pecze ditches; moreover, since the unregulated, winding beds, also held up by the unfortunate mills, cannot have a normal course of the stagnant stream. (...)

Few of the inhabitants of the city remained awake after the storm had passed; only here and there a father or two kept watch, when between one and two o'clock the angel of death and destruction arrived. The immense flood surged forth from the valleys, roaring and roaring, tearing up the ground in its path, picking up all the rubbish, and thickening into a filthy mud and mixture; it immediately rushed upon the very first houses with great force, either sweeping them away or overthrowing them; it slammed the windows, threw the closed doors from their corners, there was no question of escape except to the attics or the roofs of the houses; this too was a mere escape for straw: the raging flood fell upon the weak constitution, overturned and swept away the house, the roof, and the fugitives.

The rushing water mass grew by up to a meter per minute soon after the arrival of the main army. When the cries of distress of the inhabitants of the first houses rang out through the roar of the waves, the houses further away were already standing in the water. Soon a terrible noise mingled with the clatter of the puppets; the cries for help of those fleeing, the death groans of the drowning, the creaking of the besieged buildings, the falling of the collapsed ones, the roaring of the animals.

When the alarm bell rang, 2,185 families were fighting death in a city that had been thriving just a few hours before.

Pál Hoitsy's report on the origin of the storm from the Sunday Newspaper, Hungary 1878:

"Under temperate zones, even the forces of nature themselves produce much milder phenomena than those that can be observed under similar conditions either at the high poles or near the equator. This circumstance alone is enough for us not to consider the terrible hurricane that passed over Miskolc and some other cities on August 30-31, 1878, as a locally generated wind that, taking on its shoulders the layers of clouds coming from the Mediterranean Sea, carries them over regions where the cooler air condenses their vapors in greater quantities so that they fall as raindrops. (...)

As soon as I had a glimpse of the course of the whole phenomenon, I had to see that this was no ordinary gale or thunderstorm, but that it belonged to those cyclonic whirlwinds that occur more frequently in equatorial seas, which, according to their extent, science calls hurricanes, tornadoes, and trumpets, and whose collective name, for lack of another, I have tried to express with the word "vihador" that is popular in some parts of our country, although this is commonly used instead of "thunderstorm.”