Has anyone else been around their property tying things down and keeping outside furniture like picnic tables and bins well away from the house and windows, recharging phones and torches.
Must admit not looking forward to the next 24 hours… and I am pretty certain we won’t have power by this time tomorrow. I remember 87, and although not supposed to be as bad I still have nightmares from that terrifying experience with the sound of screaming debris flying through the air from crumbling roofs and houses and literally not being able to stand upright.
Good luck everyone especially those near the coast and I hope you and your families keep safe.
Up here in the north Pennines we lost power for six days following storm Arwen last November.
Thankfully we have back up cooking via a solid fuel range, but it’s as well to get in a camping stove and fuel as well as decent lighting.
If you are on a pumped water supply bottled water is also a good idea. Our neighbour is on a borehole and made regular use of our outside tap as we are the last house in the hamlet on the main.
Yes our longest stint without power was 12 days which was from one of the big storms around 15 years ago… appalling… since then the overhead powerlines have been significantly replaced, and now a lot more reliable… however with this wind likely lines will get pulled off insulators.
I’m also concerned about my parents’ property. They have both passed away and there are decidely dodgy windows, guttering etc which I intend to repair but currently don’t have the time or funds to address, at least until I sort out issues at my own home.
I had a site meeting in Sittingbourne on that day in 87 driving up from Bristol.
We had a new depot under construction sitting in the site office we were informed completion should be about six weeks then we heard an almighty noise and the roof blew off the site agent said make that twelve weeks another crashing noise and some of the walls blew over with that the site agent said I give up.
The drive home was quite an experience following lorries on the motorway and seeing them get caught by a gust of wind and slowly get lifted and land on there side.
I went down the M3 and across Salisbury plain up through Wiltshire to get home it was incredible to see the amount of damage that had been done particullarly the number of trees and power cables that were down a day to remember.
I’m having major work done on the garage, together with new boundary walls, under soil foul water system & surface water soak away, all under a paved patio.
As of now everything has been removed down to ground level, its surrounded by Haras fencing & stnd building regs 2.4m (huge) wooden hoarding about 15m long.
The house roof at the previous garage roof joint is open but temporary cemented in place. As of this week considering the storm on Wednesday & tonight/tomorrow, everything has been laid flat & weighted or tied down.
Am I looking forward to Eunice, have a guess.
I’m hoping that my barn roof won’t blow off again. Or the house roof. Otherwise, I don’t leave things out that might blow around. May miss the brunt of the storm - about 50 miles south of the north coast of Devon. Pretty calm at the moment - about 5 mph Easterly - but we shall see. We had 40mph wind gust yesterday…
I recall back in 1987 one of the guys I worked with who lived in rural Kent had no electricity for 6 weeks.
On a do I or don’t I in SW London, if there is a Eunice power cut do I take a chance and keep all my kit powered up or turn all off and loose the 24/7 benefits?
Each to his own perhaps.
I think I would power off… if there is fault or surge the mains voltage could get unpredictable before it fails completely or your trips go. I guess if all your neighbourhood utility wiring is underground you are probably less likely to have local issues… don’t know what the options are with damage to the grid or super grid… I guess power can re routed… but not at all familiar with how all that is managed.
I know here with bad storms the mains tends to flicker a lot before it goes completely… occasionally it struggles on with low voltage before it fails completely… though as I said above, a lot better than it used to be.
Yep DONT PANIC…
I hope it will be ok… I just hate the wind… no doubt not helped by my ‘87 experiences which really affected me… so posting here felt like good therapy
Looking at the Met Weather site, the predicted gusts for my part of the world have dropped by a few mph so fingers crossed.
I remember the 1987 storm… it completely passed me by as I was in the Soviet Union at the time on an extended holiday, and news from outside the USSR was very hard to come by back then. First I knew about it was about a fortnight after the event, when I arrived at Gatwick and the taxi driver told me what had happened. I was completely unaware of Black Monday stock market crash as well. Learned a lot about dams and molybdenum production though!
Completely calm here in Dublin but Cork and Kerry got a fair battering with gusts up to 130kmh. The winds will pick up here shortly though to about 60kmh as the centre tracks south of Ireland heading your direction!
Bracing ourselves here. We seem to lose power and phone every time there’s a storm - mainly because the exposed power lines and the phone line run together alongside a wood so any tree of branch that goes takes out the power.
Just got hit by a gust that fairly rattled the tiles!
