BBC 6 o'clock news on The Great Storm of 15th / 16th October 1987 with Nicholas Witchell & Philip Hayton, covering the worse storm to hit the UK for 300 years.
This is one of my earliest memories! I was nearly 3, watching cars rocking from side to side out of the window of our house in Dorset, until Dad told me to stay away from the glass. No power, had my grandparents round so we could all be together (my Nan was rightly convinced the storm was going to be bad), huddled in the living room with oil lamps for light. The noise was insane!
@@paulfrost8895You are therefore the same age as my brother Anthony - he turned 20 that very day. Not the best weather for a birthday! I was a fresh-faced seventeen year old YTS trainee at the time and remember it very well!
I was 21 years old and living in North London. I watched this storm with my friend and his girlfriend through their front living room window... Never seen anything like it!
You are therefore a year older than my brother, Anthony, who turned 20 on the day of the storm. I was a fresh-faced 17 year old YTS trainee at the time and remember it very well!
It's amazing to think that less than 40 years ago a massive storm like this could happen with almost no warning. As much as we sometimes mock the severe weather warnings nowadays, if something like this did happen again we'd be better prepared.
I remember this hitting Cornwall, the sound of the wind coming in off the ocean. The windows (I had sash windows) shock so badly I thought they were going to smash.
4:41 the biggest shocker was looking at that Fire Engine, Even in 1987 the design of it (and Ambulances from this time) looked rather quaint and old fashioned.Particularly when you looked to continental Europe or the USA They looked like they were designed in the 1960s with their curvaceous lines and round headlights a rather than more angular design which was the fashion in car design up to this time. 7:36 What happened to that Vauxhall 'Flat Flat' (in Lambeth) was quite incredible.
As a 16 year old I slept through it, woke up early for work & couldn't understand why the power was off, went downstairs and the front door was wide open. Only found out about it by finding a battery powered radio! My village in north east Hampshire was cut off for two days. We had absolutely no warning at all.
I am therefore a year older than you as I was 17 and a YTS trainee at the time. Relatives living in the South of England had it worse than my family in the West Midlands. It was my brother Anthony's birthday - he turned 20 the day of the storm!
Wow. So few comments here. I found this really interesting. I'm American, and what I remember most from this time was Baby Jessica stuck in the well. So, my apologies to my brothers and sisters from across the pond. What a horrible disaster. Considering that even today there are still deaths in hurricanes even when there is plenty of warning, I'm actually amazed the death toll in this surprise storm wasn't much higher. Thankfully it wasn't.
Hi. I had just turned 16 when this happened. I lived right on the south coast and remember it like it was yesterday. It was pretty hairy for a few hours but my house and family were untouched. I don’t remember the baby Jessica story. Thinking back I assume that’s because we had no power when this news program aired!
It was a freak occurance ' I was actually living just outside Boston Mass at the time ' and I recall the incident with the baby stuck in the oil shaft ' think they made a film of it right after if I recall ' I also recall attempting to ring my folks in London and not being able to get through due to Power lines being down eg ' think they sent me a newspaper clipping of it too ' a couple of years before we had a similar but lesser storm which hit the east coast but was a hurricane.
The death-toll was probably low because the storm hit during the night. January 25, 1990 saw a similar situation in The Netherlands. But because that storm reached maximum intensity during the height of the evening peak, 18 people lost their life. Surveys later showed that the public had no idea what 'force 12 winds' exactly meant to life in general and thus many people did not really know what to do. Just like in the UK, the January 25, 1990 also rapidly evolved from a not-so-special depression to a strong, extratopical cyclone, leading to the Dutch Met Office (KNMI) issuing warnings for force 10 winds the night before. But because of its rapid increase in wind-speeds and movement along the coast, the storm came as a surprise to many, even though the KNMI tried to warn the public by strengthening the warnings to force 11 and eventually force 12 winds. Because of their rapid evolution and the path along The Channel these storms take and the surprising element in them as computer-models back then usually did not see these storms coming, they are called Channelrats in the Netherlands. I was not even two years old, but I remember it quite vividly: my grandma was over from Amsterdam and had come by public transport, that had ceased to operate at some stage. She called my grandpa to come pick her up. He said he didn't want to risk his car (while he was keen on doing quite stupid things otherwise) and thus would not come to pick her up. In hindsight, a great decision ofcourse, but he would have been better of keeping the real reason to himself ;)
I was driving on the M25 at one in the morning and struggling to drive my Volvo, a heavy and solid car. The next morning whilst having breakfast i saw several cars turning around in my drive, when I set off to go to work i found out why. Trees across the lane. I managed to find a route onto the motorway which was eerily empty, apart from a few trucks blown onto their sides, just like in one of those movies set after an apocalypse
The British Met office was relying upon information from ships at sea, backed up with satellites. The reason they lost so much information and the information dried up was because shipping stayed away from the track of the storm. which means their information sources dried up. Thats why they had no warning. There was no shipping to give them that warning. Oh they learned many lessons from these events. We all did. I watched this... thing... this monster ashore... what I saw that night, what I felt that night... still terrifies me even thirty years later.
In addition, there was strike action at Meteo France which reduced obnservations from the near continent, and one observation of sea level pressure from a ship was incorrect, recording a pressure higher than reality, which meant the storm intensity was underestimated. If they had got the storm intensity correct, they would likely have predicted the change in track to the NE which brought the strongest winds over SE England (intense depressions do have a tendency to swing more northward).
@@adamlea6339 So the French stick it to us again. Not that it would've made much difference, you can't do a lot to protect property and nature from winds that severe.
At 5.27 I wander if that is actual footage of the storm or stock footage? If it's actual then it's easily the best I've seen from the '87 storm, winds clearly blowing around 60 -70 mph across the sea.
The winds were unquestionably hurricane force, but they were not a hurricane because of the location hurricanes occur, the Western Atlantic, Caribbean and South Eastern USA
