I'm in love with every strange unfolding day as the storm begins to break cover

[venta]

The BBC has just reminded me that it's twenty years today since the "Great Storm" in 1987. Among people my age - old enough to rember it, not really old enough to appreciate that it was more than a spot of run-of-the-mill bad weather - I suspect it's most commonly remembered as the storm which arrived in defiance of Michael Fish's jocular remarks that there was no need to worry. That he didn't really say that is largely irrelevant, of course; some stories are too big to be squashed by their own fallacy.

On the night of the Great Storm I was camping in a tent. Fortunately, only in a friend's back garden. We were determined to stay there - she had 50p riding on it, as her brother had bet we would wuss out even before the weather worsened. Her mother became increasingly determined as the night wore on that we were coming in the house. Her mother won, and I still remember being surprised the following morning by the wreckage of the garden: the large, heavy camping stove we'd cooked on the night before thrown across the lawn and the tent demolished.

I don't think the north got it nearly as badly as the south east did. Anyone else have any particular memories of it ?

Comments

[pm215]

I think my Dad reckoned that one of the legacies of the storm was a much more reliable electricity supply in the southeast, because all the overhead lines which were a bit dodgy got taken out by the storm. So they all got replaced at once rather than failing one by one and causing minor power outages each time...

[zotz]

I don't remember it at all except for the news coverage. I'm not sure the windspeeds were that much less up here, but they were certainly not as far over the sort of thing we get most winters, so there wasn't the same damage.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Yes, I suspect it wasn't that out of the ordinary for Durham, either. I just remember it because of the circumstances and the news coverage afterwards.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I pretty much slept through it. Woke up briefly in the night a couple of times and thought "sounds a bit windy", but that was it.

But really Oxford was on the margin of it -- I was in London the weekend after, and amazed to see the number of trees down in Hyde Park. And one big plane tree in Knightsbridge somewhere that had fallen onto and squashed a small red expensive-looking Alfa Romeo -- I shouldn't have laughed, but I did.

[ebee.livejournal.com]

I remember it clearly..my mum made us sleep at the ends of our bed furthest from the windows, and that night, our huge apple tree fell down in the garden onto the conservatory roof and my mum had to close nursery (ran in our downstairs) the next day. two of the toy trucks in the garden ended up on the other side of the lawn and 3 trees fell down on our way home from school.

A few weeks later some men came to move the old apple tree and cut it down, I remember they bought a small boy who sat in the tree with them as they cut it up. It made me cry because the tree was hurt and my mum cried too..so that afternoon we went and planted a new one but it was little and spindly and never really grew much til we moved to Cornwall.

Our old house was here in Ealing, in the posher part and I remember so vividly the tree- it had always seemed a strong good friend to me. Guess it doesn't take much to imprint Paganism on a kid.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Anyone else have any particular memories of it ?

It blew our fence over. Or to be more accurate it blew the neighbours' fence into our garden.

In some ways this was a good thing, since it meant I got to watch my Dad construct the indestructible fence of doom whilst he muttered about how if you want something done properly you have to do it yourself. (I pity the poor bastard who one day tries to take that fence down - I think it has stronger foundations than the house.)

[al-fruitbat.livejournal.com]

I was at a boarding school in North London. I was 12, and we were (not) sleeping in dormitories. It was exciting and worrying, magnified by the fact that there were about 6 boys in my dorm, and 40 or so in other dorms. No-one could sleep, obviously.

What I remember most clearly was the intense bright orange light from the sodium lamps outside, against which the trees were lashing. We could also hear distant crunches as trees came down.

It was still amazingly windy the next day when we walked to the dining hall for breakfast. Big trees were down all over the playing fields and the roads, and you could hold open your duffel coat and lean into the wind, being kept upright at silly angles.

[zotz]

Indeed. The damage was quite intense.

From a brief trawl, it looks like Scotland - and probably the North of England too - have been hit by at least several more intense storms since, but the actual damage from them was less.

It's quite staggering reading, actually - a couple of years ago a storm downed 250 million trees in Sweden, which would apparently make a stack 3m high, 3m wide, and going all the way to Australia.

[triskellian]

I was ten, and I remember going out of the back door and feeling as if I was in real danger of being picked up by the wind and blown away. I wanted to stay outside for longer because it was exciting, but some sensible parent or other insisted I come back in. I don't remember any particular damage, but my childhood seems to be filled with fences falling down and having to be replaced, so presumably there was some of that.

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

I was in Scotland. We just had gales. They were fairly bad, but so have been others, both before and since.

I felt rather cheated, to be honest with you.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I remember sitting in bed with my parents being cuddled by my mother, and we were sitting there scared while my father snored, then there was this enormous creak and crash as the huge gum tree in the garden fell over. Years later, little gum trees sprouted from that corner, from bits of root left in the soil.

[beckyl.livejournal.com]

It caused a day off school for me, because a bunch of the trees on the school bus route in had come down across the road. That was the bit through the woods near Oxshott.

Minor memory note - for some reason I always associate the Great Storm with '86, and I'm perpetually surprised by the correct date.

[erming.livejournal.com]

I remember the morning after the storms watching the bbc and seeing a report from St Martins Plain MOD excercise area and there in the background was where we'd camped a week earlier covered in fallen trees.

There were also a few trees down on the common opposite, luckily the one that was behind the lampost opposite us stayed up (unlike it's neighbour) as otherwise we'd have had a lampost crashing into the house.

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

I was at my Grandma's and slept right through it: I do remember all the tress that came down in the school grounds though and the groundskeepers chainsawing them up for what seemed like weeks . . .

[sea-of-flame.livejournal.com]

I don't remember what it did at home (we must have moved to Yorkshire just a few weeks before, and *all* storms sounded really loud with the very tall, and many, Nerwegian Spruces crowded together in the back garden) - but I remember my grandparents had just moved to a new house down near the south coast, and they went from having a garden with lots of fruit trees and a very big cedar to just having a distinctly war-wounded cedar, and lots of grass....

[rabbit1080.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing it on the news (I live in Australia). My aunt lived in the area at the time - I think it's the first time I remember hearing about scary-bad weather that potentially affected one of my rellies, and it took a good few hours to find out that she was OK.

[(Anonymous)]

I was working at a boatyard in Sufffolk at the time. I slept through the worst of the storm,but woke to find a tree accross the road had fallen. The walk to work showed more chaos in the town, though few fallen trees. At work, oh boy! An 84ft motor yacht hull slewed across the yard off its blocks and half on its side. Part off the roof off a temporary shed where it was to be housed for fitting out. Half a dozen of the many small yachts and cruisers that had torn free of their moorings were piled up on the base of our slip. And tucked away in a corner of the yard, with no chance of us getting it to the slipway, or into the water, a 40ft lifeboat suposed to be on 24 hour standby, having just had a new paint job, engine service and partial refit.

It took about a week with teams and a borrowed workboat working every high tide to remove the stranded yachts from our slip, and clear the yard enough to launch the lifeboat.

The biggest shock was on the following Sunday driving from Woodbridge to Butley for a song and music session. There are two stretches that passed through fairly dense forestry commission land, at the time planted with mostly conifers. The view through these stretches had been of the first few ranks of trees, about 200 yards at most. Now we could see the coast about 5 miles away, the whole woodland had gone apart from the odd lonesome pine.

How many remeber the hailstorm that swept Essex and Suffolk about two months earlier in August. Took out most of the glasshouses in the market gardening area from Cheltenham to Maningtree. Cars left outside had horizontal panels like roof and bonnet looking as though they had been used for a steel drum band. Friends took photos of hailstones between the sizes of tomatoes and apples/oranges. I had been upstairs gathering gear to go and run a conoeing session in the local swimming pool. I came down to find the kitchen 4" deep in water, a white water river with rapids outside the front door (on a fairly level road,albeit at the bottom of a hill the water was flowing into the tailpipe of my car's exhaust). Duration of the hailstorm as it passed over - 10 minutes!

Will

[hjalfi.livejournal.com]

I remember being evacuated from our house (Glenalmond, Perthshire, Scotland) because the huge wellingtonia (a.k.a a Giant Sequoia) that was next to it was making disturbing creaking noises. A few weeks later they actually took it down, which was a shame; although, given that it was considerably taller than the house was long, probably necessary.

(Disclaimer: Glenalmond had a number of big storms around then. I might be remembering a big storm, the the Big Storm.)

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

My school (West Oxon) lost half a dozen 300 year old trees but other than that I can't think of much that was damaged on that side of the city; our old village in South Oxon suffered two or three damaged thatched roofs and a few trees down too.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

We had an apple tree down in that storm too (and it took out part of the fence), but strangely I'm not a pagan.

[qatsi.livejournal.com]

It was a bit breezy as I remember, and Nicholas Witchell was in some bunker Down South the following morning, talking as if it was the End of the World.
That's all.

[(Anonymous)]

Are you sure you were camping out that night? I don't remember you being away. We woke to a dead calm and news of the storm in the South with the warning that it was moving North so I went out and battened down everything in the garden that was remotely movable - and later that day we had a stiffish breeze, no more. I think your camping out might have been when we caught the tail end of a Caribbean hurricane, which hushed out lead into all the streams in Swaledale and poisoned the sheep. And you're all too young, even Will, to remember the great East coast storm of 1953 -that was a STORM.

Even Will

[(Anonymous)]

You're right, I am too young to remember that one. I have heard about it though. 1953 resulted in wind devastation and massive flooding in East Suffolk. The winds caused the concurrent spring tides in the several estuaries to be much higher than usual, with many overflowing into surrounding agricutural land. Many people I met through going to sessions etc. in rural pubs spoke about that year after the '87 winds. I have to be careful about confusing these with 1963, which I also don't remember, which I think was significant for a cold and very hard winter in East Anglia, rather than strong winds and flooding. I know, from my parents, that I was living in Croydon at the time.

I also recall the January 1990, "Burns night", gales as being a year earlier! Reading the BBC links above I found my recollection was that they happened in 1989, more power lines and trees down etc. I actually spent an evening after work with a friend doing contract work for the local council, clearing fallen trees from blocked roads. Scary but fun. For example a roadside Oak with a trunk diameter of about 4ft, not quite resting on the ground because its weight was being held by a mains power cable. The Oak was almost horizontal, the power line was STRETCHED down from two telegraph poles. They were almost upright. When we cut away the branch(es) that were hooked over the cable the "spring" tension in the cable flung the branch(es) about 100ft across the adjoining field. As far as we knew the cables were still live!

Another recollection from 1987. A friend, an Agricultural Engineer, who wanted to visit his mother (in the next village, 2 miles away) couldn't get out of his village in that direction for fallen trees. He chose an alternative route that passed two American airbases (two of the biggest in Europe). This would have been 10 to 15 miles. The importance of these bases would have meant that the roads were cleared as a priority. It took him two hours with a chainsaw to cut his way out of his own village at the start of this trip.

Will

[neilh.livejournal.com]

I was doing a paper round at the time, so was one of the first people to see the damage on the round I did - which was one of the poshest streets in Tonbridge. There were a number of trees fallen and a lot of the houses had lost tiles from their roofs. There was one I remember in particular where a tree had landed resting against the gable end of a house, perfectly aligned in the middle, had it been a couple of foot to either side it would have fallen down the roof onto the wings on either side.

That morning, like every morning, all the papers got delivered, albeit a little late because the delivery van had a bit of trouble getting down from London.

[ao-lai.livejournal.com]

I remember... Not even noticing it. Had it not been for the news I would never have realised that it had happened. I suspect we were in the right part of the country...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Bugger me, I think you're right. I think I'm probably remembering Hurricane Charley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Charley_%281986%29#Hurricane_Charley) on August 25th, 1986.

I wasn't very away, only in Ruth's back garden. I was actually a bit mystified as to why I would have been camping there on a Thursday night in October.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

I was an IPS in Stevenage when that happened. I slept through it and was surprised in the morning to see our shed in next door's garden.

Sue was a student nurse at GOS at the time. She had a worse time of it: all power was out at the hospital so all the students were drafted in to manually do all the stuff that those machines normally do.