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Saturday 29th 43F. Pitch black and misty at 07.30. With fine rain on the windows. I am hoping for an early walk if it gets light enough to find the gate. That was at 8.10. The wind was roaring in the roadside trees but the rain had stopped. Half an hour was enough. I ought to go shopping in the car as soon as possible.
The storm is still expected to start around lunch time. With similar numbers to yesterday's forecast. 29m/s is around 65mph gusts. Potentially damaging and lasting overnight until lunch time tomorrow. With the risk of flying debris and fallen trees and branches.
I tidied up but have no control over the towering trees on the west and northern boundaries. Once a tree exceeds a certain size it is unreachable and/or completely unmanageable by amateur tree surgeons. Many trees are not even on our property. They certainly offer some shelter but are on marshy ground. With occasional falls of the spindly larches. A large, white willow fell in half only a few years ago. None of the trees should be able to reach the house.
Denmark's TV2 <cough> "weather" website is still using storm headline, click bait to advertise its crap programmes. Kardashians over public safety? Is that legal? Or just sickeningly immoral?
15.30 and the wind is highly variable with some rain. It is supposed to remain westerly until 17.00. Before turning North Westerly and increasing slightly. Highest gusts at 29m/s are forecast for the early hours. We hear only occasional deep roars from indoors. There is only a couple of m/s difference later, compared with now. Though the power increases as the cube of velocity.
The Great Storm of 3rd December 1999 reached the mid 30s m/s locally and did billions worth of damage. Putting electricity out for five days in mid winter. Along with the loss of our water supply when the deep borehole, supply pumps were denied power. A corner of our NW roof blew off after banging loudly all night. No light to see what was happening and no window to provide an overview anyway. A neighbour's double garage, corrugated metal roof was rolled into a tube across the profiles. Then lifted hundreds of yards over the intervening houses and trees. Before landing like an unnexploded bomb in a field.
A local farm had its buildings literally ripped apart. Including the house which bridged the two barns. Local conifer woods were snapped off half way up the trunks over large areas. Only a single petrol pump was working in the village. Leading to huge queues of selfish fools. One old man was filling his tank to the brim [very slowly] and then filling several plastic dunks on the ground. It was pitiful to watch from a queue hundreds of yards long! I drove away.
Every roof mounted, TV aerial was leaning haphazardly and countless roofs had lost tiles. Leading to a boom in black tiled roofs over the next year or two. Finding originals as replacements must have been extraordinarily difficult. Ironically, most of the damaged TV aerials were massively oversized for German TV reception.
As was ours. High on a telegraph pole we inherited from the previous house owner. The pole was blown down across the drive. So it had to be moved before I could even get out in the car. The base of the pole had been standing right on top of the plastic, mains water, supply pipe! So I had to find a special coupling in a builder's merchant to mend it. Before the water came back on. I had no idea who was responsible for such things. Not back then. We had only been in Denmark for a couple of years with very limited language skills.
The local supermarkets were stripped bare on the very first morning. I watched as a couple in a Mercedes estate bought every single bottle of water and ferried it out to their car. Leaving none for anybody else. Water had become asses' milk before my eyes. The supermarkets were dark and had no power for their tills and card readers. It was cash only. If you had it.
Outside our immediate area things were eerily normal. I risked a drive on an empty tank to a more distant village. Where I bought petrol, gas canisters and candles. Plus bottled water for making hot drinks and cooking. We used collected rainwater and well water for the toilet. Keeping warm at night was quite a problem. No power for the water pump to circulate the hot water from the wood stove. Which meant it could not be lit once the DHW tank was hot. Mains pressure system meant not a drop of water could be drawn once the water went off. No washing and no washing up!
If the power goes off this time, as has been warned, there would no TV, no streaming, no radio, no computers, no internet and probably, no phones. Who has a battery radio these days? Do phone masts have emergency power? Total isolation from vital information. The thin veneer of civilization wore right through in only one night in '99. I doubt it would be any different if it happens again.
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