October 1987

I was in Plymouth for a meeting the day before, planning to travel back to London the following morning. The wind bypassed Plymouth and, of course, the papers didn't cover it, so I had no idea of what had gone on. At the station I was told that there was only one train running up London (puzzled, but forgot to ask why...) and that it might finish at Reading. Boarded train and chatted to the guard, who finally told me what was going on!
I got to Reading early evening and managed to find a train that was aiming for Virginia Water, which wasn't too far from where we lived at the time. Tried phoning home to get the Admiral to pick me up: line dead. So I got to Virginia Water and got a taxi home. It was there that I began to realise just how much wind there must have been the night before: trees down everywhere, I only got home because the taxi driver had been working most of the day and knew which roads were open and which still blocked.
The fence had been demolished, along with several trees on the estate. And I didn't bother trying to get to work the next day as the train lines were still not functioning. Indeed, I have a recollection of using the motorbike to commute for the next few days until the trains were sorted.
 
I was living high up in a high-rise tower block in Leyton at the time and a spooky night it was.
The dairy yard opposite had all its trucks blown over.
Then I was aware of massive roofing sheets being blown up and smashing into the block and blowing around what ?, at least 50 to 60 feet up in the air. Like tissues caught on the wind.
 
vyv_cox said:
But we were in France some years later when the Boxing Day storm passed through with similar results.
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Drove through France from Cherbourg to Poitiers in the aftermath - from memory on New Years day - in my then MGBGT. Thing that struck me most was the twisted and uprooted road signs in the exposed rural areas.
 
I remember seeing Essex Marina with one end still fixed on the South bank and the other end esting on North bank of the Crouch, forming a bridge.
Lots of masts sticking out of the water too.
 
I certainly remember that night. I was staying at my parent's house, just east of Maidstone, Kent. My father woke me up as he could see a blue flashing lights on the road alongside the 4 acre garden. Pulled some clothes on and went outside with my Dad. It was a bit windy and we walked down the lower drive entrance. There was a fire engine in the road with a bough from a horse chestnut blocking the road, but no firemen in sight. Went to get a chainsaw, but it needed a quick sharpen. When we got back there was a fireman, he said the rest of the crew were dealing with a shorting power line on a nearby farm. He left us to clear the bough. When we had finished, we decided to use the other drive as some trees were coming down. At the bottom of the main lawn was a row of 17 lime trees that swept the lawn. These started toppling over as they were still in full leaf, one even snapped the trunk about 10 feet above ground - the trunk was about 30" in diameter. We then sat in the kitchen and watched tree after tree topple. When dawn broke the garden was a mess. Only 5 of the limes survived the night, but about 100 mature trees were lost. the limes paced out at about 95 feet high. The lower drive had 5 major trees across it. The road we walked to the other drive entrance had 4 Scots Pines, that had been topped some years earlier to make them more stable, across the road. The power into the house was cut and the phone line was snapped. So we all went out to try and clear the road. The road was about 15 feet below the land either side, so I sat astride a pine with a 24" chainsaw and started lopping 3 feet long chunks. Still remember an irate motorist complaining that I should work faster, nearly stopped working altogether as it was dangerous working like that. All the other helpers gave him short shrift in my defense. Later we reconnected the phone line with a chocolate box, so we could report the fault on the line.

Once the road was cleared to single track, we headed to check my boat. In May I had taken delivery of a new Feeling 286. It was moored on a 3 boat fore and aft mooring at the northern end of Chatham Reach. This reach faces south west and is about a mile long. When I arrived at Medway Yacht Club, I found my boat had been moved to a swinging mooring. According to a friend who helped moved many boats, the waves had reached about 10 foot. The yacht up wind of mine was John Tyler's (owner of Tyler Boats) Tuffglass 31, and down wind was a Sigma 41. The pull from both other boats had caused the over sized mooring lines to chaffe through. My boat then bounced alongside the Sigma and resulted in the hull cracking on the main bulkhead, at the end of the coach roof. The crack was from the waterline and over the deck and into the cockpit. If it had not been moved, she would have sunk as the crack would have shortly gone below the waterline. My 5 month old boat was badly damaged. I went ashore and bought some fiberglass mat and resin and slopped it on. The following morning we drove to Bucklers Hard Marina to check my parent's boat, which was completely undamaged.

To try and get my boat repaired was a nightmare. The importers recommended, she was returned to the Hamble for repair. The insurers agreed to cover all costs except the surveyor I employed to oversee the repairs. Once down at Hamble Point, I met my surveyor (a well known fiberglass expert) and the guy who was going to do the repair. They had already looked at the damage, when I arrived. The consensus was the hull could be repaired, but the deck was impossible to repair. It needed a replacement section of deck from the shrouds to the transom and going up the side of the coachroof and into the cockpit. The insurers agreed to the repair as they believed the boat was repairable due to it new condition and value. The problem was getting the deck section from the factory in France. The 286 moulds were in full production and took a year before it could be moulded over a weekend with the workers on overtime. I finally got the boat back about 18 months after the event. The repair was excellent and I had trouble finding any signs. I sold the boat a few years later and the surveyor never spotted any repair, never even asked me any questions. He thought the buyers were mad to have a full survey on such a new boat!
 
franksingleton said:
Not surprisingly, the OP rekindled many memories of the storm...................
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I think that all these memories have been posted, Frank, because in your OP you said "......This event gets quoted from time to time although I often wonder whether many people have any real idea or memory of the storm....." which certainly read to me as though you doubted people would remember!
 
I went to a business meeting in Toronto, Canada and the first thing they said to me was 'shame about the hurricanein England. My then boat was on an exposed mooring in Poole. When I flew home next day I expected to find no boat, but it was just fine and the bottle of fairy liquid on the cabin table was still standing upright. At the time I was a team leader on the YC's moorings committee and found pride that we lost only one boat and that only because the owner's rope strop had parted not any part of the club's mooring gear which we had made up and laid..
 
I was out at the Kensington Roof gardens that evening and when I arrived I carefully parked the car not under any trees as it was a bit windy. When I left at 2am (A work day!) I drove through Putney and was born all over the road, I told the passenger it was a bot "blowy". I arrived home in Hampton at about 2:45 and watched a shed go down the middle of the road like tumbleweed and miss all the parked cars. The next morning 6am! I jumped in my car but found I could not get to the station, every route was blocked with fallen trees so I returned to my home. Jumped on my bike and cycled to Twickenham station, only to find the there were no trains. I then queued for a call box (remember those) and said "you won't believe this but I can't get to the office..." this comment was met with laughter, the stock exchange was declared closed and I was told to go home.

I went home and collected my camera and proceeded to photograph the destruction (film in those days). It is amazing how much has changed.
 
I was in Edinburgh where the rain seemed like monsoon proportions. The wind didn't seem so bad IIRC.

However, what remains in my mind was that I went up to Edinburgh as a reasonably well off man, and came home a couple of days later as a very noticeably poorer man - my portfolio had taken a battering as the stock-broker laddies from "Three Oaks" and elsewhere across the South of England found that it wasn't just "leaves on the lines" and so couldn't (or didn't try) to get to their City desks.

I understand my broker spent the day in his local pub with his mates, drinking by candle-light !
 
vyv_cox said:
We were living in Aberdeen at the time and could not understand what all the fuss was about! But we were in France some years later when the Boxing Day storm passed through with similar results.
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Comfortably in N Shropshire - can't say any horror occurences.
However I was In la Rochelle the summer after the Boxing Day storm and was regaled with stories of working by car headlights and the excitements of 14km of pontoons, broken loose in les Minimes.

Thanks again, Frank, for keeping us au fait. Will Ane Ophelia go up the English Channel or St Georges Channel?
 
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I guess I was lucky, though I can also call it foresight. In mid 1987 I had arranged for a builder to re-cement the tiles at the edges of the roof. I lived at Rivenhall End in Essex and all the houses in the road had the same basic roof design in which there were slightly overlapping tiles at the gables. That night I had felt the strong wind and had tied my caravan down to a couple of big stakes driven ito the ground next to the drive. The following morning the caravan had only moved a couple of inches and my house was the only one in the road with a complete undamaged roof. Damage to others ranged from losing a dozen or so tiles, to losing most of the roof as the wind had lifted loose edge tiles then peeled the rest off.
 
franksingleton said:
This event gets quoted from time to time although I often wonder whether many people have any real idea or memory of the storm and the forecasts that preceded it. To mark the 30th anniversary, the Met Office has issued https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/2017/30th-anniversary-of-the-1987-storm. There is a fair amount of background and about how weather prediction, the science and the technology, have moved on. The first is highly dependent on the second.

An obvious question is whether it could be so nearly right but so badly wrong again. Probably not. That is mainly because of ensemble forecasting. This allows the forecaster to see a range of possible outcomes from the same initial data. Small differences in the initial data analysis may lead to quite different forecasts.
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Was in Florida when the winds that were the beginning of it passed by. The TV was full of it with reporters on the beach with a bit of wind doing their usual "shes going to blow" type reporting. We actually went to Daytona Beach at the end of the blow and nearly got caught for speeding on the beach. I wondered why this guy in a pick me up with police type lights on top was shadowing us!
We flew back to UK a couple of days later so you could say we followed the blow across the Atlantic.
Stu
 
Flica said:
Comfortably in N Shropshire - can't say any horror occurences.
However I was In la Rochelle the summer after the Boxing Day storm and was regaled with stories of working by car headlights and the excitements of 14km of pontoons, broken loose in les Minimes.

Thanks again, Frank, for keeping us au fait. Will Ane Ophelia go up the English Channel or St Georges Channel?
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I did not hear the forecast on R4 this morning so do not know if it was mentioned. However, see http://weather.mailasail.com/Franks-Weather/Latest-Uk-Forecast-Charts-5-Days
 
On my travels in the Caribbean I met an unassuming chap; at one point we talked about making your own luck. He disagreed. In the summer of 1987 he had finally completed an innovative manufacturing project with all the supply lines in place and had two glowing reviews in the trade magazines. The product: concrete fence posts!

He now cruises the world on his yacht :)
 
Clearly the October 1987 storm had huge impact (and publicity) - probably because of the timing, with lots of leaves on the tees, and certainly due to track through the southern part of the country.

But I wonder if any of the meteorologists can clarify where the wind strengths of this storm actually sit statistically in terms of strong winds hitting the UK. I don’t have this data personally, but I seem to recall that in wind strength it would not be in the top 5 storms hitting the UK in 1987 alone. And probably not the top 50 in the period since.
 
dunedin said:
Clearly the October 1987 storm had huge impact (and publicity) - probably because of the timing, with lots of leaves on the tees, and certainly due to track through the southern part of the country.

But I wonder if any of the meteorologists can clarify where the wind strengths of this storm actually sit statistically in terms of strong winds hitting the UK. I don’t have this data personally, but I seem to recall that in wind strength it would not be in the top 5 storms hitting the UK in 1987 alone. And probably not the top 50 in the period since.
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remember however, that hurricane force windspeeds alone do not a hurricane make rains and storm surges apply also, plus associated thunderstorms and tornadoes. hurricane force wind gusts are not uncommon and we sailed in them a couple of times in Western approaches. Sustained windspeeds of 65kts and above are an entirely different matter and their wind gusts might be 50% or more greater than the sustained speed. News reports tend to quote the highest recorded gusts.
 
Cantata said:
I think that all these memories have been posted, Frank, because in your OP you said "......This event gets quoted from time to time although I often wonder whether many people have any real idea or memory of the storm....." which certainly read to me as though you doubted people would remember!
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Yes, I suppose that sailors are more weather conscious than the general public and listen more carefully to forecasts.

I was hoping that more people would have picked up on how forecasts in some ways are far better now than in 1987 although there are still problems in predicting detail.
 
I was living in London and slept through it. I did wonder idly why I had never noticed a small park on my left as I walked to West Finchley tube station, then realised that it was a side street (Moss Hall Grove, I think) completely covered in fallen leaves.
 
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