I still have a 30 minute tape somewhere(audio) of the wind noise. I was in
Basildon in Essex and awoke in the night as my window seemed to be bulging
in - when i realised what was going on and the noise it was making I taped
it on my recorder - there are some great noises and lots of me swearing as I
was living in a bedsit 3 floors up on the exposed SW of the town and we were
getting battered - all the walls had collapsed as far as I could see (10
foot brick ones) and there was no power. The next day I had to walk to work
picking my way around all the debris - I worked at the local housing office
and it was a busy day what with whole gable ends blowing down.

I remember the walls all being down more than the trees, thats living in a
new town for you. The fact that I taped the wind that night never fails to
make people think I am a crackpot, but then they don't have the 1987
"hurricane" on audio - hoho


"Mark Annand" wrote in message
et...

Just a request here, did anyone on this ng
experience this? If so what was it like where you lived? I was living
in
Australia at the time and missed it.


Gavin Staples.


Leaving a friend's house in Bembridge on the east of Isle of Wight
on the evening of 15th October 1987, I remarked that 'it was getting
a bit windy'. Needless to say, she hasn't let me forget those words
to this day.

Hampton, Middlesex: a clear recollection of the evening before the storm
there was that it was still and remarkably warm, with a strikingly balmy
feel to the night - quite unlike mid-October, and a group of us remarked
about it at the time - with a backdrop of frog noises from the Longford
River.

That evening was very much detached from the following morning. Having
slept through the storm, the wind had faded when I woke to no
electricity - the radio was functioning but the room darker than it should
be ... the bedside light's fused? Ah, so is the kitchen light ... and the
kettle ... before the penny dropped that it was a power cut seemingly
across the entire south east (a sister living on the slopes of the Epsom
Downs who had been evacuated by the emergency services after a falling
tree mangled a gas main, spoke later about the sky lit for some time by a
wild discharge of power from major switchgear many miles away)

Back at home, the semi-darkness on waking was caused by a lilac which had
come to rest against the flat's window. Exploring immediate surroundings,
many mature trees were down across the local roads. Despite this, a few
people wished for the previous reality fervently enough to actually wait
at bus stops to travel to work - when it was patently obvious that buses
together with everything else were at a stand for the time being. There
was enough damage to imply that a daytime event would have been a very
major catastrophe.

Working with boats at the time, we were apprehensive of the state of
things at work, backed by big plane trees. Those, though, were intact, and
the solitary 'Incident' was a particular Thames skiff, 24 feet long, that
had been upside down and six feet up on a stack of boats, had been picked
up, spun through 360 degrees in mid air, had received one tell tale impact
in the process before going through another 180 degrees and somehow set
down moderately gently on flat ground, as the thing was undamaged save for
a small telltale puncture.

Not so some parts of Bushy Park, where an entire small wood was more or
less mangled as though by a punch - very much worse than other damage
despite the mass of trees there that should have offered some mutual
support. The reason I heard later was that wind speeds some distance above
ground were far more severe, and that when turbulence brought one of these
gusts to ground level this resulted in the patchy damage. In this case the
wood had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and most of the trees
were sheared off or badly mauled.

The following Monday was 'Black Monday' in the city of course, and it's
impossible not to suspect that the weather may have made a small
contribution to the behaviour of the City of London's finances not to
mention the rest of the world's. I'm sure the experts would disagree ...