In article , John Hall writes:
In article ,

"danny(West Kent)" writes:

It definately was a 1 in 250... a real freak, and on another level to 1990,
'but' like I said, only in such a small area... extremel local (Kent,
Sussex). Other areas it was just a normal gale\storm, whatever.

The area severely affected was considerably larger than that, including
at least Surrey and the eastern half of Hampshire.



In Oxford, there was structural damage to buildings as well as the loss of
valuable trees.

Friday, October 16th 1987 was the day of my vasectomy!-) I had taken a
sleeping tablet on Thursday evening to get "a good night's rest". Upon
awakening around 8 AM my wife informed me that she'd had a terrible night
because of the noise of the storm...

The fence surrounding the grounds in front of our block of flats had
"exploded" outwards, caused by the turbulance of the winds hitting our
west-facing building. One part lay to the north, in a school playing
field, one part lay south, in a neighbours garden, whilst the third part
lay west, in the road. Buses were driving over it.

The journey to the clinic was interesting for the variety of debris which
littered the roads.

Upon arrival we walked through the grounds of the Churchill Hospital,
looking in amazement at the number of trees which had been felled. When we
arrived at the Elliot Smith clinic we had to step over the splintered
remains of about one-third of its roof, which had been lifted off and
dumped on the grass.

This seemed to be just the entrance area so we joined the ensemble of
nervous "clients".


The operation went ahead, in itself a strange and surreal experience:-(


As you know a green cloth is placed over the patient, with an opening for the
"area of the incision, which is shaved clean". I looked like an extreemly
small christmas pudding on an unusually bumpy snooker table.

The surgeon was not in a good mood. He hadn't slept well, either.

Locating, and gripping, the vas deferens is not always easy, and once found
should not be released: they don't let it happened twice.

My surgeon had my vas deferens, all right, but no knife.

He shouted for a nurse (we were all alone). He shouted again.

I could hear laughter way down the corridor. Everyone was preoccupied with
the storm, and the tales of destruction.

"Florence!" he shouted at the top of his voice. At this point, my wife told
me, she could hear him, and she was still in waiting area.

Through the slit between his mask and his "cap" I could see anger, frustration
and panic.

He apologised for what he had to to do. Keeping a firm hold of my now
rather sore vas deferens, he dragged me and the operating trolley to the
closed door, opened it and bellowed so loudly that the receptionist let
out a squeal.

I was then pulled by my vas deferens back into the centre of the room
before Florence arrived waiving a plastic bag. "Are these what you want"
she smiled, opening the bag to reveal a surgical knife. I tried to look
suave.


Unless something went wrong with mine, never let anyone kid you that the
operation is entirely painless. An electric shock delivered to somewhere
tender raised me body, vas deferens and green cloth a good two inches above
the trolly bed.

The surgeon pushed me back down. "I perform a destructive method" he said,
and the smoke from cauterisation rose and circled on the ceiling. "Look
at this!" he grabbed my shoulders and pulled me up into a sitting position
where I could inspect the removed length of vas deferens at closer quaters.


Was I supposed to comment? Finest vas deferens I had ever seen?


One down, one to go....


I did not walk properly for four days. I was off work for three. So I missed
seeing the damage in countryside.


However, Harcourt Arboretum (Nuneham Courtenay, just south of Oxford) - now
part of Oxford University Botanical Garden - lost the tops from its pair
of Redwoods. These were the oldest Redwoods planted in England, from the
same batch of seeds used to plant them in Kew Gardens, and among the tallest
trees in England.


You can still see the damage today. Not to my vas deferens, though... but I
was attached to 'em;-)



Cheers,

keith











---
Iraq: 6 thousand million pounds, 70 UK lives, and counting...
100,000+ civilian casualties, largely of coalition bombing...

Gavin Staples wrote:
"Graham P Davis" wrote in message
...

A few days after the event, I was chatting to someone about it and he

said he'd slept through it. After dawn, when he finally began to
surface, he felt something tickling his face. He brushed it away but it
came back to tickle him again. This repeated for a while until he opened
his eyes to see that it was leaves brushing his face. These leaves were
attached to a tree which had crashed through his bedroom window.

Graham
Bracknell



And he slept through that. My goodness!



An explanation might be gained by expanding your comment to re-create
the old advertising slogan: "My goodness! My Guinness!"

Graham

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 ...

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 ...

"Brian Blair" wrote in message
...
I still have a 30 minute tape somewhere(audio) of the wind noise.

.... and I still have a somewhat longer tape of the outgoing radio
broadcasts from LWC/High Holborn on that morning - I shan't easily
forget that couple of days - had to sleep on the floor of the Conference
Room against the sound of the emergency generator in the basement ..
then do the next night duty with effectively no sleep.

Martin.

"Dave Ludlow" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 14 Nov 2004 13:08:17 -0000, "Philip Eden"
Highest hourly means and gusts (in knots) we
Shoreham-by-Sea 74/98
Langdon Bay 56/94

Highest 10-minute winds (not a complete list):
Royal Sovereign 75kn
Lee-on-Solent 70
Langdon Bay 62.

It looks like the highest 10 minute mean wind speeds probably occurred
on the Sussex coast and at least two places on the mainland recorded
mean wind speeds of hurricane force.

If we convert 10 minute means to to 1 minute mean wind speeds
("sustained" winds as used by the US National Hurricane Center) and
apply the 0.88 conversion factor used in the US (65kn -- 57kn), at
least one inland place (Herstmonceux) and most of the South Coast from
the Isle of Wight and Portsmouth eastwards probably experienced
hurricane force winds that night. That, for me, settles the
"hurricane" debate. From the layman's point of view, The Great Storm
was a hurricane.

--
Dave


That's how I feel about it. Although the technical composition of the
depression was not a hurricane. We all know on this ng what a hurricane is
made up of. The fact we had sustained wind speeds of hurricane force and had
the damage that was well in the category of what is experienced in a
hurricane (just ask those in Florida). Well that in my view fully justifies
the term The October 1987 Hurricane.

Gavin

"Graham P Davis" wrote in message
...
Gavin Staples wrote:
"Graham P Davis" wrote in message
...

A few days after the event, I was chatting to someone about it and he

said he'd slept through it. After dawn, when he finally began to
surface, he felt something tickling his face. He brushed it away but it
came back to tickle him again. This repeated for a while until he opened
his eyes to see that it was leaves brushing his face. These leaves were
attached to a tree which had crashed through his bedroom window.

Graham
Bracknell



And he slept through that. My goodness!



An explanation might be gained by expanding your comment to re-create
the old advertising slogan: "My goodness! My Guinness!"

Graham


:-) Gavin.

In message , Richard
Dixon writes
Richard,
I was on night shift so followed every detail. There was tropical air
involved - whether that makes it a 'Hurricane' I really don't know.
Bracknell made a mistake and the intervention forecaster was at the root
of it.
On the military side a 140KT gradient was forecast (reduction for
curvature negated that to a point). The forecast was based on the then
coarse mesh while the fine mesh ran the low from Biscay into Holland.
There was no damage to military installations - and I certainly had all
Tornados off the pan and into hangers.
Thank heavens the Office got it wrong otherwise everyone in the south
would have been outside tying down caravans etc. The death toll would
then have been near 100 rather than the 13 with them all safely tucked
up in their beds.
Cheers
Paul
--
'Wisest are they that know they do not know.' Socrates.
Paul Bartlett FRMetS