Early Friday morning, in the first hours of the day, a suburb west of Budapest. Fire takes hold of a two-storey building in Budakeszi, five miles, eight kilometres, from the capital. The place was being used as temporary lodging for workers. By the time the flames were out, at least three people were dead and nearly two dozen more were hurt.
Hungary’s disaster management authority ran the response. Formally: the National Directorate General for Disaster Management. Its crews fought the fire through the early hours until the building was clear.
Forty Paramedics, One Street
The scale of the call-out says something about how bad the inside of that building was. More than 40 paramedics went to the scene. Eighteen emergency vehicles. Firefighters pushed in and came back out with survivors, several of them, and with three gas cylinders hauled clear of the wreckage.
Under a section of collapsed roof, teams found the bodies. Two men. One woman.
Police Take the Case
What started it? The first answer came at a Friday news conference from Pest County police, and it pointed at a blast: an explosion inside one of the rooms, likely, was the trigger for the fire. Inspectors who walked the building afterwards came back with a second finding, several irregularities, including gas usage that broke the regulations. That combination, a suspected explosion plus non-compliant gas, moved the file from accident to crime scene. Police said a criminal investigation into the case has been launched, and further detail on the cause will rest with its findings.
The police did not say, on the day, how many people were inside when the fire began, and no victims were named.
Twenty-Two in Hospital
Ambulance crews logged 22 people treated for injuries from the blaze. Four of them were listed in life-threatening condition, and many of the others were seriously hurt on the authorities’ own account. Rather than send everyone to one ward, the medics spread the wounded across eight Budapest hospitals, burns cases and trauma cases sorted by what each unit could actually do for them, and by which of the eight sites had the capacity.
That is where the story rests: a workers’ dormitory on the commuter edge of Budakeszi, a cordon around the burned shell, and a criminal file with a gas supply at the centre of it. The next word on the cause belongs to the investigators.
