Was 18 and living in Streatham SW2 at the time, slept through the worst of the storm. Awoke around 5am for work, no power, couldn't believe my eyes when I ventured out. Shop signs swinging, alarms going off everywhere, trees down, wheelie bins and milk crates blowing around the roads. Was still extremely windy at that time. Was around same time as the king's cross disaster. R.i.p. to all who lost their lives in both events.
You are therefore a year older than me - I would have been a seventeen year old YTS trainee at the time. It was my brother's 20th birthday the previous day. His name is also Anthony, by the way!
This was a classic Bay of Biscay cyclone. France sees this kind of storm about once every 30 years. They hit the north and Scotland about once every 25 years. They don't often hit London, and that was the 200 year part of the storm. The same models that missed with this storm nailed the Burns Day storm three years later. It's not an exact science. Londoners, thinking these storms only affect places like France and the US, just got a rude awakening to the fact that it can happen there too.
7:15 - Rowridge transmitter on the Isle of Wight took a pounding back then. It transmitted BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Ch4 back then to the south of England. No cable or satellite back then to rely on.
I think the original Emley Moor transmitter took a bit more damage in 1969 to be fair? 🤔 Then, of course, they decided to build the more re-enforced iconic concrete tower that storms and the weather over that area can't drag down. 👍
When I was at college I went to this birthday party of a guy from my class and Michael Buerk's son was there as well, friends with the guy obviously. He actually ended up taking me back home afterwards. It took ages cuz he went the total wrong way at 1st. But it was mad I met him like that. I used to love watching '999' back in the day, so it was quite the occurrence for me obviously
His post-factum contribution to the tragedy is to my eye less than voluntary and has a rather whimsical establishment "stiff upper lip" whiff about it.
Fatuous and vacuous remark from MB. We live on an unstable rock orbiting a fiery ball at 66K MPH subject to myriad, random risks of annihilation. To think the efforts of fellow homo sapiens who work for the met office in a field less than a century old should take the rap for not insulating the UK citizenry from exceptional meteorological phenomenon is nonsense.
Worked right through it packing lunches for the city down on Canary Wharf at Docklands. Reminded me of Cyclone Tracy back in Darwin, Australia in 1974. I recalled it being called Hurricane Andrew back in the day.
My parents where on the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry just 1 or two hours before the worst of the storm. I slept through it and lost about 1/3 of the tiles on roof on the west side of the house. Front garden was fill of tree branches. Had no TV for a few days as the local TV transmitter stopped working.
I remember this MASSive violent force 12 storm I was only 17 years old, and I knew it was coming because there was a late forecast around midnight when winds began to strengthen. I lived in Golders green north London and the wind sounded like a Boeing 747 flying past my windows ! Absolutely amazing night and I'm stormy weather fanatic. Then the storm of 25th January 1990 hit during the daytime. 🌪️
You are therefore the same age as me, because I was a 17 year old YTS trainee at the time and remember it very well. My brother Anthony turned 20 the day before!
The interview with Ian is painful, yet I think there's no denying that the MET let everyone down that day. I don't get why they would just go "ahhh it's midnight - better not bother calling half the essential services to warn them or anything"
He was sleep deprived, as a result of working the night shift the day before and not being able to get home as a result of the weather. Not in the best frame of mind to deal with being grilled by an interviewer. However, the people to blame are not the weather forecasters, but the MET office.
I was living in north London at the time and had no memory of the event, having a good nights sleep, I woke up and only saw a tree branch in the road at Highbury, couldn’t see any structural damage.
I was in Camden in a top floor flat. I woke once in the night (perhaps because of noise), looked out and noticed it was a bit windy and went back to bed. I had no idea anything was wrong until I got the bus into the West End where I worked and there was a tree down in Gower Street.
I remember this night well. I woke up in the middle of the night when a stray branch came through my bedroom window. Shortly after a massive horse chestnut tree came down in our front garden. Very lucky to not take out the front of the house. We lived in Essex, no TV was on, we later found out we had lost our ariel. Power was on and off all night. The only thing we could get was radio 1. Was a scary night for a 12 year old!
"Why are we unable to cope with severe weather"? The clue is in the word "severe". Show me a country that can deal with a 1 in 200 year event relative to their climatology without any problems.
Sounds like Bill Giles was to blame rather than poor hapless Michael Fish. From the tone of Michael Buerk's voice, it was clear who he thought was to blame :)
“Too dangerous for children to venture out,” despite being the grand age of 7 it was brilliant to venture out! We had no power for three weeks (not days! As they said), family all slept in the only room with heat, head to toe in sleeping bags. Brilliant as a kid, I feel for my folks though!
If this had happened in northern England it would’ve just been a storm and been brushed over but because it was in London and southern England it’s the great storm.
and it was a great storm mate unless you was in it you wont know what it was like i for one heard it and was woken up by it and never got back to sleep after that so trust me it was the worst storm i have seen
@@Pixel1962 I was there too, and it was crazy. Bay of Biscay storm gone rogue, over 110mph winds, so much damage, many lost parts of their homes or worse. we had no leccy for three weeks and camped in the lounge but hey I was 10 so it was equally exciting!
It's very simplistic to blame Michael Fish, Ian McCaskill etc. for not getting the forecast right, the Met Office had many employees putting together the weather modelling.
Yes, it is said that the 'hurricane' that was on the way was in a different place, not SW England, so technically he was correct, as no hurricane developed in that area.
Michael Buerk says that some areas of London were still without power at 1pm. We were lucky in Charlton then. We were only cut off till eleven in the morning
18:05 - "We didn't tell the ambulance people. They didn't ask us to" - errrr.... isn't it common sense to tell everyone you can about weather as bad as this without them asking? Especially the emergency services who could spend time preparing to rescue people and clear up the mess left by the storm that the Met Office failed to predict until it was too late?
The one thing the Met still hasn't done is set up a weather radio service that doesn't depend on the internet or mass media. The colour warning system works as long as people have access to the internet, as long as they have a TV or broadcast radio turned on and, more critically, if they are wake. The US has a nationwide system of VHF radio stations operated by the Weather Service broadcasting forecasts 24 hours a day. A receiver is about $35, and it has a decoder that will set off an alarm and broadcast a warning as long as the receiver has power, mains or battery. They have sirens for the alarm that will wake the dead. In the case of 1987 storm, warnings, even if they happened, would have gone out when most people were asleep. All the emergency services have radios at their offices so they get warned at the same time as the citizens. We have all the same web based warnings as the Met, but the VHF radio network is our fallback if everything else is out.
I completely agree with you about the weather radio service. The biggest problem is convincing the public they actually need them. Sirens are not really well represented in the US. They're mostly in the tornado alley states of the Midwest and some in the SE of the country in what's called Dixie Alley. In my part of the country on the Texas Gulf Coast, the old civil defense sirens from the 50's did double duty for tornado warnings, but those were dismantled in the 70's and in any case, only served large cities. I've experienced many natural disasters in my life, and they taught me one thing: do not depend on government or anyone else to keep you safe because they can't. All they can do is help clean up the mess when it's all over. If you can't get out, nobody else can get in, so plan to be on your own for quite some time and have a plan in place to care of yourself and your family. In the case of this storm, would the outcome have been all that different had everyone been warned? Would emergency services have been able to reach people any easier? The trees would still have come down, roofs blown off, the electrical grid and communications lost. Would people have tried to evacuate given a few hours warning? In a city the size of London, that alone would have caused more deaths with people stuck on the roads at the height of the storm as we saw in Houston with Hurricane Rita.
@@RepublicTX I'm an amateur radio operator and Skywarn volunteer with the NWS. I'm in favor of discontinuing all of the siren networks. They are incredibly expensive to maintain, don't add anything to warning times, and aren't even heard by large numbers of people. With better insulated homes, cars with the a/c or heat on all the time and windows rolled up, and people out shopping in large stores where the sirens can't be heard most of the time, we're much better off getting people to use a cell phone, local media, or portable weather radio for warnings. Even if you hear a siren, you get no information about things like what direction a storms is coming from and how much time do you have before it hits. Sirens are a legacy form the cold war that needs to go away. The problem in the UK was the hour this storm hit. There was no public warning system, most TV was off the air at 0300 or had prerecorded ads running, nothing to wake people up and let them take cover as they could. Even being under a bed is better than sleeping in one when the roof collapses. We also have to remember there were no such things as smartphones in 1987, ad even cell phones weren't common among the general public. The UK Met Service now has much better monitoring and satellite data than in 1987, and it's not likely another 1987 type storm will sneak up on the country. there's a mobile app to track storms now and some rudimentary warnings. I don't think it's enough but the Met Service apparently thinks it is. It's also important to realize that the UK just doesn't get the kinds of storms we get in the US. Not to diminish the number who died, but the death toll from the 1987 storm was 22. We lost 23 people from one long track tornado two weeks ago, and will probably lose at least 250 more during this tornado season. .
@@sarjim4381 Very cool that you're a radio operator and part of SkyWarn! My dad was big on ham radio and I still remember his call letters: WA0ZJN. My grandfather ended his meteorology career as the MIC of the Albuquerque office, so my family is steeped in weather awareness. I completely agree with you on the siren issue, and you're right, it's a very expensive system with little reward. I grew up in Kansas and even as a child, they just became part of the background noise in storm season. Off the top of your head, do you have any idea what it costs to set up and maintain the weather radio system? The biggest problem as I see it is getting the public to pay attention to weather, preferably before the warnings go out. Case in point, all the people who had to be rescued from flooding when Harvey visited Houston. Nobody really believed we could get 30+ inches of rain, and most people didn't understand the event was just getting started for us when the storm made landfall in Rockport. It was beyond ridiculous that city and county authorities didn't tell people in low lying areas to evacuate. I didn't wait to be told and bailed out 12 hours before the rain began, taking many of my neighbors with me. Those who remained had to be boated out at 3:00 am when their homes filled with 6 feet of sewage contaminated water. (That was my 3rd and, God willing, LAST flood. We've moved to higher ground and hopefully away from the Gulf coast in a few more years.) I felt a bit like Chicken Little trying to get people to leave, but most insisted that a constable would personally knock on their door and tell them to evacuate if it became necessary. Of course, no such thing ever happened. The problem is that by the time it's necessary, it's too late and physically impossible to leave; hence, my sermon on self-reliance. Don't get me started on the need for flood insurance. LOL!
@@RepublicTX Good for Grandpa and good for you for being weather aware as well. Now go get your ham ticket. It's easy now. No code to learn and 35 question multiple choice test for an entry level Technician license that would take maybe 10 hours of study if you have any kind of electronic knowledge. I have an Amateur Extra license, the highest you can get, and I'm an idiot. You can do it, and Grandpa would be proud. :-) The NWS All Hazards Radio System was expensive to begin with. My guess is over $100 million to establish and expand the system in the 70's, so a lot more in 2019 money. It's a much cheaper system to maintain. I don't have any current figures but it was about $30 million nationwide on over 100 transmitters. Most of the transmitters are just commercial versions o ham repeaters, and they last a lot long and require far less maintenance now than in 1970. Replacements are in the $3,000 range compare dto $35,000 in 1970. They all use text to speech synthesis so no human labor is required other than to type up the warnings distributed by text to other outlets. It's a good system but I one I don't think would be cost effective for the UK. They just don't have enough killer severe weather. A more comprehensive smartphone alert system would make more sense. I also spent 27 years as my county sheriff's department's search and rescue coordinator. There are people who are aware of hazards around them and hose that aren't and I don't think there's anything we can do to reduce the numbers of those who aren't. Some of them will be less each year as they dies because they didn't take precautions or evacuate. I have lived way too many years to think I can change human nature now.
I got up as normal about 7.00 am and got ready for work, we didn't have rolling news then. When I stepped out the door my neighbour said that everywhere was shut and that it was too dangerous to go out. It seemed a bit windy. I tried ringing work but the phone was dead and local radio confirmed what I'd been told. I noticed that some tiles had fallen off the roof and embedded themselves in the wet soil. I went back to bed grateful to miss out a day of work.
As the computers get better, the prediction of the weather patterns and locations improves as a result. However, the timings are still often way out so you often don't know which weather is going to hit at which particular time, which is the information you need. Bring back the slug-based Tempest Prognosticator!
Michael Burke is hilarious! how condescending?!! Not allowed to talk like that nowadays, of course 🤐 Reference to the ‘tramp’ not funny though 😲😔. I was 15yrs old, living in the Medway towns. The Convent private school, Sittingbourne, Kent was ripped apart, all our course work was over the hockey 🏑 pitch & tennis courts. Sorry Sister Mirriam but the storm ⛈ ate my homework!!!! NO school for weeks; YEY!!! 🎉
I remember it vaguely I was only, 6.5 years old, so probably didn’t, pay much attention. However, I do remember watching the news at times, if only to name the newsreaders. Must have been pretty bad though!!
Slept through it. Cardiacs gig, was 'in me cups' so to speak. Got up for work, motorbike blown over. Pulled out onto road; thought IRA had been at it....night I'll never forget!
El Astronaute Have you never heard of initiative? Did you know that an estimated 15 million trees were brought down in the path of this storm? This was not the only one that needed attention. Every available chainsaw was in use elsewhere.
Not many people had chainsaws then - the craze for destroying woodland hadn't got fully under way by then and was mainly left to the Nature Trusts and Forestry Workers . It's quicker to axe a large trunk than to hand saw it and a lot of the trees that were down on roads were massive . I remember walking underneath four big poplars , the trunks of which wrere wider than your outstretched hands .
Hi James. Thanks for your comment. I do have the end but unfortunately I recorded over a section in between. A bit a short-sighted ill discipline at the time. I suppose I could stitch together what I do have though. I'll have a look at doing that.
78 Martians were seen in a rowing boat off the coast of Portsmouth just before the storm hit that night.. About 20 minutes later, eyewitnesses said they saw the boat turn into a spaceship and the Martians were heard shouting at the fish in the Solent off the Isle of Wight..😇😈😈😈😈😈😃😃😃😃😃👽👽👽👽👽👽👾👾👾💀💀💀💀
Eeuw seaman floating about in dover sea area...... hope you swimmers back in 87 kept your mouths closed 😱😱😱 RIP tho the lost fishermen that lost their lives tho on a more serious note 😔
