Anybody Remember 16/10/87?

[Rod]

It’s the 30th anniversary of “The Great Storm”, the one that the weather forecasters got wrong and something Michael Fish was pilloried for.

Our village was cutoff for a day due to fallen trees and we were without electricity for 3 weeks.
I came across a load of candles, hurricane lanterns and a couple of Tilley Lights when I cleared out the garage recently. Fortunately, since then, power cuts have only been for the odd couple of hours or so.
We had a gas hob and fire so could cook and heat water and keep a bit warm. I borrowed some paraffin and a calorgas heaters from site but they were smelly and gave off a lot of water vapour.
We passed the time playing cards and listening to the battery powered radio.
A friend had a portable generator and came round every few days to keep our freezer frozen.
IAfter 3 weeks I’d just got around to connecting up our B&W portable TV to the car’s battery when the power came back on!

 

[wizer]

I was at primary school. Our portakabin class room was divided into two by a tree!

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[Malc2098]

My patrol area was the Chilterns. Trees down all over the place. They were beech on thin topsoil over chalk. Everywhere were these huge white discs of roots vertical after the tree came down.

 

[AndyP]

Oh yes. I was on a yacht on the Norfolk Broads taking part in the Barton Regatta. We had moored up for the night down a dyke with a pub at the end. In the morning ( we had drunk enough to sleep through WW3 ) the dike was blocked by a dozen or so fallen trees. No way out. No lecky in the pub but they hand pulled pints all day and supplied cold food until the boat yards came along and cleared the trees.

One of my mates had a rather nice lotus at the time which his father had put in the garage while he was away with us. Chimney stack blew down, smashed through the roof of the garage and the roof or his lotus.

 

[tracerman]

The only notable event at home was that we were woken during the night by one of our ridge tiles sliding down the roof . It just missed our car . I was renting a workshop at Stanbridge Earls ( Nr Romsey ) and there was a tree down blocking the road but I don't recall any loss of electricity . Happy days .

 

[fiveeyes]

Deja-vu ? I hope not. Looking at the world weather, I see a storm headed your way. Batten down the hatches! Stay safe. 5

 

[Rod]

Thanks fiveeyes.
Yes looks like Ireland, the North West and Scotland are likely to be the worst hit areas.
Where I live in the South, winds of 20 mph are forecast so we should be ok.

Rod

 

[Dave1w]

I’m sat in a boat up in Scapa Flow, they are expecting a bit of a blow in a couple of hours, but it was flat calm today until now.


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[Doug]

I was 21 in 1987, apart from 2 particularly nice young ladies my recollections of the year are a little blurry :lol:

 

[chataigner]

Oh yes, I remember very well ! We had recently bought a victorian property in Pulborough, W Sussex and were part way through work on it. We went to a concert in Brighton and when we came out it was quite hard to stand without leaning into the wind on the seafront. Then of course it got worse.

Final score : 8 large (10m+) trees down in our garden, extension roof missing, never found, electricity off for over a week and a corrugated iron shed roof that did not belong to us turned up in the drive next to my car - which miraculously it had not touched.

One piece of good news, the surveyor had warned us that a large chimney was a in bad shape and as we were installing central heating we had decided to have it taken down. It had been done just a couple of days before.

 

[AndyP]

When the insurance assessor came to by Aunt's in Selsey he asked why she had not made a claim for the greenhouse. She replied that she did not have one. But there IS one in your garden madam.

 

[selectortone]

It was pretty blowy here in Bournemouth, and we're used to a good blow once or twice every winter. I remember being woken by the wind howling at about 3am and looking out the bedroom widow and being bemused in my half asleep state by seeing all sorts of stuff going past the bedroom window horizontally. It was an old house and at one point I was worried the sash window might blow in it was rattling so much. That house was about a mile inland from the beach... houses along the clifftop took a real pasting. We lost a lot of slates off the roof and I had to go up into the loft and nail some poly sheet onto the exposed rafters to try to keep the worst of the rain out. The house was really shaking - I have a vivid memory of using the loo and seeing the water slopping about in the toilet bowl. Bizarre.

Lots of bits of other people's fences in the garden the next morning. Shards of slate were ankle deep in the passageway between my house and the neighbours. Trees down everywhere.

In Highcliffe, just down the coast from me, an old people's home just back from the clifftop lost its entire flat roof. Old ladies on the top floor were woken by the sight of the stars, a howling wind and clouds scudding by where their ceilings used to be. That must have been pretty scary.

 

[RogerS]

I don't recall that event as 'noticeable'...guess nothing happened of note to us. I was in London at the time, don;t recall SWMBO calling in a panic that the house had blown away.

Read in the paper that they re-ran the data for that day using their latest super-duper computers and it came up with the same forecast. 'What hurricane' !

 

[Rod]

Perhaps you had too much cider Roger? [emoji3]

“The storm made landfall in Cornwall, and tracked north-east towards Devon and then over the Midlands, going out to sea via The Wash. The strongest gusts, of up to 100 knots (190 km/h; 120 mph), were recorded along the south-eastern edge of the storm, hitting mainly Hampshire, Sussex, Essex and Kent. The Royal Sovereign lighthouse 6 miles (9.7 km) off Eastbourne recorded wind speeds on its instruments at the highest velocity it could measure, 110 mph (180 km/h).

The storm caused substantial damage over much of England, felling an estimated 15 million trees[14] (including six of the seven eponymous oaks in Sevenoaks,[15] historic specimens in Kew Gardens, Wakehurst Place, Nymans Garden, Hyde Park, London and Scotney Castle[16] and most of the trees making up Chanctonbury Ring). At Bedgebury National Pinetum, Kent almost a quarter of the trees were brought down.[17][18] There have been many claims that the damage to forestry was made worse by broadleaf trees still being in leaf at the time of the storm, though this was not borne out by an analysis by the Forestry Commission.[19]

Fallen trees blocked roads and railways and left widespread structural damage primarily to windows and roofs. Several hundred thousand people were left without power, not fully restored until more than two weeks later. Local electric utility officials later said they lost more wires in the storm than in the preceding decade. At sea, as well as many small boats being wrecked, a Sealink cross-channel ferry, the MV Hengist, was driven ashore at Folkestone and the bulk carrier MV Sumnea capsized at Dover, Kent.[20]

The National Grid sustained heavy damage during the event, as crashing cables short-circuited, which in some cases overheated the main system. Its headquarters faced the choice of keeping the Grid online to help London as the storm approached but risk an incremental system breakdown, failure and burnout, or to shut down most of South East England including London and avert that risk. The headquarters made the decision, the first one like it since before World War II: to shut down the South East power systems to maintain the network as soon as signs of overheating began.[verification needed]

In London, many of the trees lining streets, particularly plane trees, were blown down overnight, blocking roads and crushing parked cars. Building construction scaffolding and billboards collapsed in many places, and many buildings were damaged. The following morning, the BBC's largest broadcasting site, Lime Grove Studios in White City, was unable to function due to a power failure — ITV's TV-am and BBC1's Breakfast Time programmes were broadcast from different emergency facilities in emergency formats. TV-am broadcast from Thames Television's Euston Road studios, while BBC newsreader Nicholas Witchell had to broadcast from the BBC1 continuity studio at BBC Television Centre, with the wall decorations used for Children's BBC hastily taken down. Much of the public transport in the capital was not functioning, and people were advised against trying to go to work. TV-am host Anne Diamond did go back to the regular TV-am studio with reporter Kay Burley, whilst Richard Keys remained in the Thames Television studio in case the power became even worse, and indeed, power did go back down at around 8:15am.”

 

[Rod]

I found these photos I took in our village - the downed trees blocked the only surfaced access road we had at that time.

Rod

 

[Tusses]

:lol:
that one with the lads climbing on the tilted tree , and the root ball showing ...

Have you seen the youtube vid showing a similar tree, that as they took the limbs off, suddenly the rootball became heavier that the tree and the tree stood back up ! ?

I can just imagine them catapulted through the air :lol:

 

[Tusses]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... CArVzAm6WM

 

[timothyedoran]

I found these photos I took in our village - the downed trees blocked the only surfaced access road we had at that time.

Rod

Loving the Raleigh burner with yellow mags and colour matched tyres. Everything was better in the 80/90s than now... Apart from the interweb which is much better now.

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