St Jude is the name of the apostle of the lost causes, therefore the weather forecast people decided to name the terrible storm coming to the south of Britain.
How will we remember the St Jude’s Day Storm? It will be forever associated with tragedy: a falling tree killed a 17-year-old girl in her home in Kent, a man died in Watford when his car was crushed, and a man and woman were killed after a house exploded in Hounslow when a falling tree hit a gas pipe. At Heathrow, dozens of planes were grounded and there was a succession of reports from around the south of England.
The storm was certainly dramatic. Yet at times yesterday, watching the news channels, you might have imagined the Apocalypse was upon us. In truth, winds like these affect many parts of the country every year; unusually, this storm was tracking across the South and into the Home Counties just in time for the rush hour. Was that really good reason to shut down the entire rail system serving Europe’s biggest city, hours before the storm had even arrived?
What is particularly striking is the way the language of the Atlantic hurricane season. We talk of “hurricane-force winds” simply because some gusts are over 72mph, which is Category 12 – the highest – on the Beaufort scale. But in a hurricane, such wind speeds are sustained, often for hours on end, with the gusts reaching 160mph. At its peak, Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, had maximum sustained winds of 175mph and gusts of 215mph.
The hurricane analogy was pushed further when the storm was given a name. A bright spark with an ecclesiastical calendar noted that yesterday was the feast day of St Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes. English people have become far too ready to adopt the language of cataclysm and disaster for events that in other parts of the world would hardly merit comment. England is not on a fault line, so have no earthquakes or volcanoes; yet we are obsessed with the weather, even though nothing much happens of great consequence.
But very occasionally it does. In January 1607, in the worst recorded natural disaster to hit Britain, an estimated 2,000 people were drowned along the Bristol Channel and the Severn Estuary by a surge of water that swept away villages and inundated vast areas of farmland. It had long been assumed that a storm surge was to blame, but recent research suggests that it may have been a tsunami caused by an earthquake or a rockfall off the coast of Ireland.
More recently, a torrential rainstorm on Exmoor in August 1952 caused a wall of water to pour into the North Devon village of Lynmouth, killing 34 people. The following January, a vicious northerly storm combined with high tides brought devastation to the east coast. The sea rose by 18 feet above its mean level, overwhelming coastal defences and causing extensive flooding. More than 300 people were killed – though the toll was higher still across the North Sea in Holland, where 1,800 people drowned.
The great storm of October 1987, which toppled an estimated 15 million trees and left a trail of devastation, made yesterday’s gales look like a mere zephyr by comparison. So, too, did the Burns Day storm on Jan 25, 1990, one of the strongest on record in the UK, with sustained winds across parts of Scotland exceeding 70mph – not far off a Category One hurricane. Then there were the unusual events in Lewes in Sussex in 1836: a three-day blizzard caused a huge build-up of snow on the cliffs above the town, and the resulting avalanche demolished dozens of cottages below, killing eight people. A nearby pub bears the name The Snowdrop Inn, which would probably be considered tasteless today.
The development of 24-hour news has tended to create a sense of foreboding through repetition. TV stations deployed their teams in advance – so were not about to admit it when the storm turned out to be not that terrible after all. The BBC was broadcasting live from Brighton beach, which was bathed in bright sunshine as a moderate wind whipped up the white horses in the background.
Yesterday’s storm was forecast to be a monster even when it was a mere eddy over the Atlantic, with supercomputers projecting the track and possible strength of a storm that still had 2,000 miles to travel. But in the future we could tell our grandchildren about the great St Jude’s Day Storm.
No comments:
Post a Comment