There have been many Great Storms in British history, including the Really Great Storm of November 1703 and Dawn French's Great Storm that hit the village of Dibley approximately every six months during the 1990s. But today we remember the GreatStorm that flattened southeast England during the early hours of Friday 16th October 1987, exactly twenty years ago today. And we remember this for three very good reasons.
1) It's within living memory for most of the population. 2) It really was a very great storm, the fiercest since 1703. 3) It hit southeast England, which is where 90% of the UK's media is based.
Never mind that Scottish islands see storms of this ferocity more like every 30 or 40 years. Never mind that more people died in the great Burns Day Storm of 1990. Never mind that most of the British population have never even been to Kent, let alone care how many trees grow there. This storm was great, QED.
Those of us who lived beneath the path of the Great Storm of 1987 all have deep-seated memories of the event, which we love to recount in tedious anecdotes. Assuming we were awake between midnight and 6am, that is. I was, just about. I went to bed just after one, having listened to rather a lot of gale warnings at the start of the late night Radio 4 shipping forecast. "Outside the wind goes mad," I noted in my diary at the time, and then fell asleep. I was woken at half past three by the racket outside, stumbled from my bed and closed the rattling window tight shut. And then I slept on oblivious, until my alarm woke me up at seven. I was luckier in this respect than the unfortunate lady crushed to death by a falling chimney in a hotel less than a mile away. All four TV channels were off air at this point, until the BBC managed to resurrect a very makeshift service from what looked like the inside of a cupboard. On my walk to work I had to step over several fallen branches, and detour around two felled trees. It was unusual to see the ground completely covered with green leaves, untimely ripped before autumn proper had begun. And at work a window had blown in, covering my desk with damp and general wetness. Not that you care about what happened to me, of course.
If you want to remember more about the Great Storm of 1987, here's some proper stuff: » A detailed analysis of what happened from the Met Office » The storm developed very suddenly over the Bay of Biscay, in an area devoid of weather ships, during a French meteorologists strike and before the introduction of automatic buoys. Here are some (not terribly distinct) satellite photos. » Hurrah for YouTube - here's Michael's Fish's infamous weather forecast, here's ITN's 5:45 news summary and here's Fred Dineage and Fern Britton doing TVS's regional news bulletin » Ah, poor MichaelFish. He wasn't talking about this storm, it wasn't a hurricane, and he really did warn of "really stormy weather" ahead. But we pretend not to remember that. » During the storm the highest recorded wind speed (117 knots) was actually in France, on the coast of Brittany. England's highest gust (100 knots) was felt at Shoreham in Sussex. » 18 people were killed in Britain that night and 15 million trees were felled (12 million of them in forests, and 3 million individual trees elsewhere). The Forestry Commission remembers. » The National Trust are holding a series of anniversary events in properties devastated by the storm (see before and after photos from Kent and Sussex here) » The storm was accompanied by unprecedented rapid changes of temperature (from 8°C to 17°C in 20 minutes in Hampshire) and pressure (up 25mb in 3 hours in Dorset) » All European high and low pressure systems are given official names, a bit like American hurricanes. But all the European names are up for sale. If you want to "adopt a vortex" then you need to send either €199 (Low) or €299 (High) to the Berlin Institute of Meteorology (or else bid for the leftovers on eBay). Honest, it's official. Names for 2008 are now up for grabs (makes a lovely Christmas present). » The next Great Storm might come this year, or it might not arrive for centuries. So don't have nightmares.
