Suspended

The Met Office, the national meteorological service for the UK, has issued a Red Weather Warning for London and South East England for today from 10am until 3pm. Some commentators have noted that  London has never had a red alert before so we’re preparing from something unprecedented. 

Obviously, London has had bad weather before but the colour codes only came into existence around 2008 and, thus, we have had less than 15 years for something this risky to be reflected in a red warning.  That, alone, shows how rare this kind of event is.  The suggestion was that we all remain indoors as much as possible to minimise risks from fly debris and reduce the possibility of being stranded because of disruption to travel. This was not a hard ask for me as I just continued to work at my desk while, occasionally watching the neighbour’s bushes bend and sway in the wind.

The storm has been named Eunice. Naming storms in the UK is an even more recent invention than the colour coding scheme. We only introduced storm naming in 2015. Apparently, it helps make the public more aware of the weather conditions which seems ironic given the British stereotype of weather talk.  I learned today that the UK Met Office jointly compiles a list of storm names with the Irish and Dutch weather services, Met Éireann and KNMI, but a the name itself is only used once a weather system has the potential to cause an amber or red warning.

This morning started calmly enough. I was on a conference call with a colleague and we were laughing at how mild it was. At lunchtime, in the middle of the forecasted peak, it was incredibly windy. I took some action to prevent various items in the garden flying away.  Living in a terraced house in suburban London I assume that we are protected from the worst because all the surrounding buildings limit the gusting ability of the wind.  Eventually it calmed down enough that, in the early evening, I could run to collect some things for dinner.  I took this photo as I passed the station as all train services in the area had been suspended mainly, it seems, because of trees on the tracks.  There was an uprooted tree on the way to the shops but a casual look suggests this area seemed to have survived unscathed.  

On our street, some of the overhead telephone cables appeared to come loose and were hanging quite low across the road. I called BT and waited about 20 minutes for the call to be answered; I assumed there were being swamped with reports of infrastructure brought down by Storm Eunice.  About 20 minutes after my call an Openreach van appeared outside the house and a man retrieved a big hook from the back.  He worked very quickly to simply snag the cable and cut them. Then he tied the cable that remained attached to the telegraph pole to the pole itself. That was it and he drove off. I felt a bit bad because somebody my have just had their phone service disconnected but the cables were going to get snagged in some passing vehicle, pulling the whole pole down, which would have been worse.  But I was impressed how quickly they appeared to deal with the issue in the middle of the storm.  The only other damage I can see from my house is a fence on one of the houses along the main road which seems to have a lost a panel.

Elsewhere it has been much more dramatic and dangerous. Indeed people are stranded in places as a lot of train companies did what South Western did and suspended all trains.  One of the most talked about impacts is that the roof of the O2 (ex-Millennium Dome) has been damaged. I am intrigued that much of the media seems to refer to this as “shredded”.