Storm stories

[ladyofastolat]

The winds in the Solent are force 12 on the Beaufort scale – hurricane force, or so a sailing friend told me. All ferries are cancelled, which has the pleasant side-effect of cancelling a meeting I was due to go to, since the people leading it live on the Mainland. Not that I could have got to it anyway, since the roads are blocked by trees.

The tall conifers just outside my window are bending alarmingly. We all had a fierce debate last Thursday on what I should do when they start to fall - hide under my desk, or run for the stairs. This week, a different set of people are in the office, and opinions are still raging fiercely. I still adhere to my "cower gibbering under the desk and hope" approach.

How are other parts of the country faring in this gurt big wind?

EDIT (1 p.m.) It's getting worse. I just popped out, and it was seriously hard to walk to the car, and almost impossible to open the car door. Many roads are closed, some villages are cut off, and people are being told to avoid any roads that go up hills. I've been working downstairs most of the morning, nicely away from the row of swaying trees. It feels safer.

EDIT 2: But - woo-hoo! - our hosepipe ban has just been lifted!

Comments

[the-marquis.livejournal.com]

I think the '86 blow was described by the Met Office as a hurricane, I couldn't say I slept through it.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

From the Met Office (now based in Devon!) website:

"TV weather presenter Michael Fish will long be remembered for telling viewers, the evening before the storm struck, that there would be no hurricane. But he was unfortunate. Fish was referring to a tropical cyclone over the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean that day. This storm, he said, would not reach the British Isles - and it didn't.

It's worthwhile to consider whether or not the storm was, in any sense, a hurricane - the description applied to it by so many people.

In the Beaufort scale of wind force, Hurricane Force (Force 12) is defined as a wind of 64 knots or more, sustained over a period of at least 10 minutes. Gusts, which are comparatively short-lived (but cause much of the destruction) are not taken into account. By this definition, Hurricane Force winds occurred locally but were not widespread.

The highest hourly-mean speed recorded in the UK was 75 knots, at the Royal Sovereign Lighthouse. Winds reached Force 11 (56-63 knots) in many coastal regions of south-east England. Inland, however, their strength was considerably less. At the London Weather Centre, for example, the mean wind speed did not exceed 44 knots (Force 9). At Gatwick Airport, it never exceeded 34 knots (Force 8).

The Great Storm of 1987 did not originate in the tropics and was not, by any definition, a hurricane - but it was certainly exceptional."

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

This is what I've always thought, too - that it wasn't a hurricane, though it might have had some gusts that were hurricane force. It certainly devastated the Isle of Wight, though. A Victorian pier was destroyed, and there are entire bare hillsides that used to be covered with trees.

I saw a very interesting documentary on that storm a year or so ago. What I'd never realised was that it effectively led to the stock market crash (Black Monday), because things had been shaky anyway, but no-one could get into work on the Friday because of storm damage, so everything went crash.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Yep indeed. I had just started work (in the financial services industry) then, and remember it well (both the day, and the wider course of events).

It's not generally remembered, though, that the FTSE 100* ended the year higher than it had started.

*Am I the only one who gets annoyed with Channel 4 news calling it, "The index of 100 leading shares"? Anyone who wants to know the level of the FTSE 100 will know what is meant by, "The FTSE 100".

There might be more point to it if they occasionally gave the level of the mid caps, the 350, the small caps or the All Share index.