by Simon Levay
At any rate, they issued a forecast that was similar to the earlier one, and consequently Bill Giles’s presentation on the Thursday evening news was similar to the one given by Michael Fish at lunchtime – minus the hurricane story, of course. Again, the emphasis was on the prospect for heavy rain, with some mention of strong winds in south-eastern coastal areas. Thus most Britons went to bed without an inkling of the disaster that was about to strike. If they took any precautions, it was to station their wellies by their front doors, not to batten down any hatches.
Around the time of Giles’s evening presentation, the centre of the oncoming depression lay in the western approaches to the English Channel. It still seemed as if the Met Office’s forecast – a track up the channel and across the south-easternmost portion of England – was a good possibility. Between 7pm and midnight, however, the depression began to veer onto a more northerly path, and the depth of the depression intensified. By midnight, the depression was nearing the coast of Devon, and the sea-level atmospheric pressure at its centre had decreased to about 953 millibars. This corresponded to the pressure that (on a normal day) would be encountered at an altitude of about 1,500ft. It was at least 12 millibars below any estimate offered by computer models during the run-up to the storm. (By comparison, the pressure in the eye of Hurricane Floyd – the infamous Floyd – dropped to 921 millibars.)
With the extreme deepening of the depression, the winds picked up to very high speeds. The highest winds were far above the land surface and thus were never actually measured. From the spacing of the isobars to the south of the storm track, however, it can be calculated that ‘geostrophic’ winds at altitude would have blown at about 300 knots (345mph). The actual high-altitude winds would have been blowing at somewhat less than geostrophic speeds, because they would have been slowed by centrifugal forces as they followed the curved path of the isobars. Still, they must have been blowing at speeds far above the threshold for hurricane status (65 knots, or 75mph) or even the threshold for the most violent category 5 hurricanes (135 knots, or 155mph). Of course, as Michael Fish stated, this did not mean that the storm was in fact a hurricane.
At the Earth’s surface, winds were much slower, but they were still exceptionally strong. In the English Channel to the south of the depression, and along the adjoining English coast, winds reached 50 knots around midnight, making it a ‘severe gale’ or ‘storm’ on the Beaufort scale of wind strengths. A gust of 95 knots (109mph) was recorded on the French coast at about the same time.
During the small hours of Friday morning (October 16) the centre of the depression began to track across southern England, well to the north of its forecasted path. The depression lay over Bristol around 3am, Birmingham around 4am, Nottingham around 5am and Hull around 6am. These cities experienced only gentle winds, or even complete calm, as the depression passed over them, but it was a different story to the south. Steady winds of 60 knots or more were widely reported, and gusts reached much higher speeds. The strongest gust recorded on the English mainland was 106 knots (121mph) at Gorleston on the coast of Norfolk. Even in London, a gust of 94 knots (108mph) was recorded at the British Telecom tower at 2.40am, shortly before London’s electricity supply failed and the anemometer stopped recording. This was the highest wind speed ever recorded in the capital. The highest wind speed measured anywhere during the storm was a 117 knot (134mph) gust recorded on the coast of Normandy shortly after midnight.
Besides the wind and rain, southeast England experienced remarkable changes in temperature as the warm front and the pursuing cold front passed overhead. Shortly before midnight at the Met Office’s station in South Farnborough, southwest of London, the temperature rose by 9°C (16°F) in 20 minutes, and fell by the same amount a few hours later. Rapid pressure changes also occurred, particularly as the tail end of the depression swept across England: rises in pressure by as much as 12 millibars in one hour were recorded toward the end of the night. Both the temperature and the pressure changes were unprecedented in terms of their rapidity.
The human impact of the storm was felt earliest in the Channel. A catamaran carrying six people was put into difficulties off the coast of Dorset: the Weymouth rescue lifeboat set out in mountainous seas and, with support from a Royal Navy destroyer, was able to save the crew. A coaster, or small cargo ship, was damaged off the Isle of Wight and required rescue by two lifeboats. Farther to the east, it was even worse. A bulk carrier capsized and sank outside Dover harbour, taking the lives of two crew members. A cross-Channel freight ferry, the Hengist, ran aground near Folkestone, and the crew had to be brought to shore by an antiquated rope-and-harness contraption known as a breeches buoy. (The ship was saved and now plies the calmer waters of the Aegean under a different name.) Two passenger ferries, with 400 passengers aboard, were unable to enter port and had to ride out the storm at sea. A lifeboat set out from Sheerness, on the north coast of Kent, to save a fishing boat that was running aground; it rescued the crew but then was itself driven aground by a violent gust and had to remain there for the rest of the night.
Onshore, 16 people died. The most frequent cause of death was treefalls, which killed nine people in England. One of these, a homeless man, was killed directly by a tree that fell in a London park. Four people – including two firemen returning from an emergency call – were killed by trees that fell on their vehicles, and three others died when their vehicles collided with fallen trees or while swerving to avoid one. A woman in Chatham, Kent, died when a tree crashed through the roof of her home.
Other deaths included three people who were killed by falling chimney stacks, a fisherman killed by a flying beach hut and a motorcyclist who was blown into a barrier by a violent gust. Besides the British victims, four people died in France.
The main physical damage was to trees: an estimated 15 million of them were destroyed over a span of about six hours. Two factors conspired to maximise the damage. First, most deciduous trees were still in leaf, thus giving the wind an easy purchase. Second, the ground was sodden from weeks of rain, making the trees much less securely rooted than usual. Not even those trees whose roots held fast were safe, however: many of them succumbed to trunk breakage, a mode of failure that greatly reduced their salvage value.
In falling, the trees wreaked havoc. Many fell on their owners’ homes. Here is an excerpt from an account written by a meteorologist; HD Lawes:
We gave up trying to sleep and I made a cup of tea... Up to a point, one feels that your own home is the safest place to be but I had never seen any storm like this and I was beginning to feel uneasy... Another particularly strong gust started up, there was a huge rumbling crash and a rushing noise. The house shook, the ceiling cracked and outside masonry was falling. We realised that the cedar tree had fallen and rushed upstairs to where baby Sam had been asleep. There was a gaping hole in the wall of his bedroom and the ceiling light was blowing in the wind. Luckily Sam was still there in his cot with only a few pieces of plaster and brick on him. He was crying lustily, which was reassuring, and Sue plucked him from the cot. We rushed downstairs and out of the front door, pausing only to rescue the cat, my pipe and tobacco. Outside we had to clamber through a morass of branches and foliage to where a neighbour was holding a torch and we gratefully accepted their hospitality.
Trees fell on roads and rail tracks in unimaginable numbers, making them impassable. Among the millions of Britons who found themselves trapped in their homes or unable to get to work were Anita Hart and her husband; at least their son’s hurricane warning had caused them to cancel their holiday. ‘Our caravan would have blown over,’ Anita said. Indeed, many caravan parks near the coast were scenes of complete devastation.
Trees also fell on power lines, causing outages. In fact, by 3.30am nearly the entire southeast of England, including most of London, had been plunged into darkness that lasted until dawn. With nowhere to send their electricity, power stations had to shut down abruptly. Many communications links were broken, either by trees falling
on lines or by the collapse of broadcasting towers.
Although the immediate harm of the treefalls lay in the damage they caused, it was the sheer loss of trees that most affected Britons in the longer run. South-eastern England had not experienced such a violent windstorm in nearly three centuries; thus many trees had had time to grow to maturity and beyond without ever being severely tested by the elements. Majestic, ancient trees were a beloved and seemingly permanent feature of the English landscape, but that changed in the Great October Storm. Among the places hard hit were the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in West London, Britain’s premier arboretum and botanical garden. Five hundred trees – about one-third of the garden’s stock – were destroyed, and an equal number were severely damaged. Among the trees lost were many rare specimens, such as a cherry-bark elm (Ulmus villosa) – a species that is being harvested out of existence in its native Kashmir. Even greater damage occurred at the Royal Botanical Gardens’ second site at Wakehurst Place in Sussex, where more than half the trees were downed. Other arboretums, parks, private gardens, and woodlands suffered major losses. There was also severe damage to commercial forests: losses equalled about two years of lumber production for the entire United Kingdom.
Treefalls were the most prevalent type of damage done by the storm, but homes also suffered damage from chimney falls, stripping of roofs and sidings, and the like. One in six homeowners in southeast England filed insurance claims after the storm, and total insured losses (for Britain alone) amounted to £1.4 billion.
For meteorologists, in particular, it was a memorable night. Some were at their homes and lived through experiences like the one described by HD Lawes earlier. One meteorologist lamented that he slept soundly through the weather event of the century. Others were on duty. Those at Bracknell had to cope with a power outage that halted the Cyber 205 in its tracks around 4am. Although any forecast for mainland Britain was now superfluous, the computer was also programmed to provide individualised, automated forecasts for the oil rigs in the North Sea. Thus, as the storm roared toward the rigs, the night staff had to hand-process, type and fax the forecasts – an operation that took many hours. (One rig narrowly escaped disaster as a ship that had broken away from its moorings bore down on it: the ship was pulled away just in time.)
Most of the Bracknell day staff failed to show up, so the night staff had to continue on duty. One person who did show up was Ewen McCallum. He had prepared a summary of the week’s forecasting for a conference that day. This task had been making him nervous all week because he was new on the job and also because there had been no weather of interest to talk about. When he arrived, his boss said, ‘Never mind the bloody conference, the shit has hit the fan and you’re going to be on in an hour to explain it!’
In fact, it soon became clear that the Met Office would have a lot of explaining to do, because the storm provided a field day for the media, especially the tabloid press.
WHY WEREN’T WE WARNED? screamed a headline. The Daily Express spoke of the ‘complete, shameful devastation of the credibility of those smugly useless TV weather people’. The more staid Independent spoke of the ‘dead silence from the frog-spawn watchers,’ and the Guardian described the Met Office staff as being ‘at the top of everyone’s list of duffers’. Many papers ran stories alleging that the French and Dutch meteorologists got the forecast right, unlike their incompetent British counterparts.
The quotes just mentioned are taken from an analysis of press responses published by Met Office staff. The analysis also mentioned that the Met Office received hundreds of letters from members of the public, the overwhelming majority of which expressed ‘support for the Office and appreciation of its services’. This is a bit too selfserving to believe, but Britons do have a reputation for siding with underdogs. At least one highly critical letter did arrive. It was from the BBC, which accused the Met Office of damaging the corporation’s reputation by failing to provide adequate warning of the storm.
Luckily for the Met Office, the Great Storm was quickly driven off front pages by an even less-heralded disaster. The following Monday was Black Monday, when stock markets collapsed around the world. The London market lost £50 billion in total share value on that day alone, and by the end of the month more than a quarter of the London market’s value had been wiped out. Many Britons whose homes had escaped the wrath of the storm now faced even worse damage to their bank accounts.
Of course, there had to be an investigation into what went wrong with the storm forecast, and who better to conduct it than the Met Office itself? In fact, the person who was given the main job of reviewing the forecasting process was the head of Central Forecasting, Martin Morris. Not surprisingly, the report laid the blame on a factor that no one at Bracknell could be held accountable for – the shortage of data from the Atlantic. In fact, about the only person who was singled out for criticism was Michael Fish (for his ‘particularly unfortunate’ ‘no hurricane’ comment), but even he wasn’t mentioned by name.
By way of bolstering their assertions about the cause of the erroneous forecast, the meteorologists described how they repeated the run of the fine-mesh model that had been most in error (the one that ran after midnight on October 15 and which influenced Fish’s ‘no hurricane’ forecast at lunchtime). This time they added the extra data that had not been available at the time. According to the report, the model now came up with a good prediction of the storm’s track and intensity. But the researchers admitted that they achieved success ‘by selecting values of the adjustable parameters’. When researchers model events that happened in the past, almost any model can be made to predict the actual outcome if one twiddles the knobs for long enough: this, it seems, is what the Bracknell group did.
Perhaps aware that an internal investigation might not satisfy the Met Office’s critics, the Secretary of State for Defence commissioned a review of the report’s findings by a well-known mathematician, Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, and a university-based meteorologist, Robert Pearce. These two were somewhat freer in their comments than were the authors of the internal report. They criticised the duty forecasters at Bracknell for following the computer models too closely and for failing to recognise a situation in which the models were likely to underestimate the strength of the winds. Swinnerton-Dyer and Pearce also compared the British Meteorological Office unfavourably with its French and Dutch counterparts. The French meteorologists, they said, were better educated and trained and had faster computers, and as a result did a better (though still imperfect) job of forecasting the October storm. (Jacques Siméon of Météo France confirmed this to me.) Some of Swinnerton-Dyer’s and Pearce’s recommendations were implemented: most notably, the Met Office was promised a new supercomputer, which was finally installed in 1991.
Thomas Jung, the ECMWF scientist who recently reanalysed the 1987 storm, believes that weaknesses in the Met Office’s computer models, and not problems with the data, were responsible for the erroneous forecasts. When Jung applied the ECMWF’s current model to the then-available data, he got an excellent prediction of the track and intensity of the storm for several days beforehand (though for some reason the prediction broke down during the final few hours before the storm). Jung tested the sensitivity of the model’s prediction to slight variations in the data, such as might be caused by erroneous or absent measurements at some locations. He did this by running the model 50 times, each time using slightly different starting conditions. The model robustly forecast the storm in spite of these perturbations. This kind of ‘ensemble forecasting’ is now standard practice, because it gives the forecasters a measure of how confident they can be in the model’s predictions. Thus it helps avoid situations like the one that occurred in 1987, when the models were in conflict but there was no objective way to assess which one was closest to the truth.
How did the Great October Storm measure up to other historic windstorms? The previous great storm of this type to strike southern England occurred on November 26 and 27, 1703. The effects we
re described by novelist Daniel Defoe (of Robinson Crusoe fame) in his 1704 book The Storm, or a Collection of the Most Remarkable Casualties and Disasters which happen’d in the late Dreadful Tempest both by Sea and Land. The storm followed very much the same track across southern England as did its 1987 counterpart, and was probably similar in magnitude, but it did much greater damage on account of lower building standards in those times. Some details recorded by Defoe, such as the stripping of the lead roof of Westminster Abbey, suggest that winds may have been even stronger than in 1987. About 8,000 people died: these included the Bishop of Bath and Wells, who was ‘found with his brains dash’d out’, and 1,500 sailors who drowned when a dozen ships of Queen Anne’s navy were sunk.
Actually, windstorms nearly as powerful as the 1987 event cross the British Isles quite frequently, but they nearly always affect areas much farther to the north, such as the Hebrides Islands or the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland. These attract very little attention because they cause next to no damage. ‘They just blow the sheep backward,’ as Bill Giles put it. Remarkably, another very powerful windstorm swept across England just 27 months after the Great October Storm. The storm of January 25, 1990 was accurately forecast, but because it struck during the day and affected a wider area, it caused more casualties: 39 people were killed in Britain and about 50 in Europe. Another three million trees were destroyed in the UK, adding to the toll of the 1987 storm.
The most disastrous European windstorm on record occurred on January 16, 1362. Known as the Grote Mandrenke or ‘Great Drowning’, it raised a wall of seawater that surged for miles across the coastal lands of the Netherlands and neighbouring countries. At least 25,000 people drowned and the coastline was permanently altered. The loss of life would doubtless have been much greater, had not the Black Death already killed off about half the population.