Millions of people in Ireland and northern parts of the UK on Friday heeded the advice of authorities to stay home in the face of hurricane-force winds that disabled power networks and brought widespread travel disruptions.
Forecasters had issued a rare “red” weather warning, meaning danger to life, across the whole island of Ireland and central and southwest Scotland.
Ireland bore the brunt of the storm first, as it was hit with wind gusts of 183kph, the strongest since World War II, as a winter storm spiraled in from the Atlantic before hitting Scotland.
Photo: AFP
A man died after a tree fell on his car in County Donegal in the northwest of Ireland, local police said.
City centers, such as Dublin in Ireland, Belfast in Northern Ireland and Glasgow in Scotland were eerily quiet, much like the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as shops stayed closed and people heeded the advice to not venture out.
For those that did leave home and were caught in one of the wind gusts, it was a struggle to stay upright.
“I want to thank members of the public for largely following Police Scotland’s advice not to travel,” Scottish First Minister John Swinney said.
More than 1 million homes, farms and businesses on the island of Ireland and Northern Ireland were without power as record-breaking wind speeds swept across the island. A further 100,000 customers in Scotland were also reported to have lost power.
Schools were closed and trains, ferries and more than 1,000 flights were canceled in the Republic of Ireland and the UK, even as far south as London Heathrow, as the system, named Storm Eowyn by weather authorities, roared in.
The disruption was set to last through yesterday.
ScotRail said the storm caused significant damage to infrastructure and that a full assessment of the network would need to be done, which would include the removal of debris.
Ireland’s weather office, Met Eireann, said the 183kph gusts early on Friday were recorded at Mace Head on the west coast, beating a record of 182kph set in 1945. Wind speeds in Scotland were slightly lower through the day, although still historically high.
Part of the storm’s energy originated with the system that brought historic snowfall along the Gulf Coast of the US, said Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster at the private weather company AccuWeather.
Scientists say that pinpointing the exact influence of climate change on a storm is challenging, but all storms are happening in an atmosphere that is warming abnormally fast due to human-released pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.
“As the climate gets warmer, we can expect these storms to become even more intense, with greater damages,” said Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change effects at Newcastle University.
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