Goodbye Éowin, Hello Herminia (or maybe Hugo)

I’ve been without power for half a day and without internet (aaaargh!) for the last few days, finally restored last night. So this is a brief post and of course it has to be about the weather. This is what Storm Éowin (a character from Tolkien, apparently) looked like as it barrelled towards us across the Atlantic last Thursday night, packing winds of 147kmh.

The whole country came to a standstill and I lay awake listening to the tiles rattle on the roof and various ominous crashings and bangings and thinking about my PV panels and how secure they are. I need not have worried – Éowin roared over us and did less damage around here than our most ferocious one ever, Storm Darwin. I hunkered down on Friday, boiling water on the wood stove – and even had neighbours over for coffee!

Some parts of the country got very badly hit indeed and are still without power and are coping with the damage, so we were comparatively lucky. And now it’s Sunday and Storm Herminia is hitting us – although inexplicably it’s also called Storm Hugo on the Met Éireann website, with a yellow warning already in place. To show you what it looks like outside, I am reposting a stop-motion video we made several years ago of how the weather sweeps across our view. This is a thirty minute session of Irish weather coming in to Roaringwater Bay compressed to thirty seconds, each frame being shot a second apart.

And now I will re-post the results of Storm Darwin – so far the worst storm we have experienced in our time here. The rest of this post dates from 2014:

Storm Darwin, 2014

We looked back recently and counted the number of posts both of us have done on the subject of the weather, and decided not to do any more on pain of boring our readership to death. But this week Met Eireann issued a rare Code Red warning and their direst predictions came true. The Southwest of Ireland was pounded by hurricane force winds, the like of which many people had never experienced before. Storm Darwin wreaked havoc in our corner of the world.

We were lucky! Our power was off for several hours, but our house is set up so we can still stay warm, run water, and cook. We lost a few more trees, including two that fell over the road, blocking access. Our terrific landscaper, Thomas, chainsawed them off so that at least cars could get by. Trees that came down in our neighbour’s property severed our telephone cable and we have been told that it could be ten days before this is fixed – so we have no landline and no internet. We use our cell phones to connect whenever we can in cafes in town or in friends’ houses, but reception has been spotty all week due to storm damage.

Many of our neighbours have not been so fortunate and are still without power. For some this can also mean no water and no way to cook. The County Council has issued a warning to boil drinking water amid fears that water supplies have been contaminated. All over the countryside crews are out clearing away trees and restoring cables. Two young men were swept to their deaths by huge waves on the north side of the Sheep’s Head. Another man, part of a telephone repair crew, has died while working on the high wires. Roads and towns flooded although this time the storm surges did not coincide with high spring tides so the water damage was not as bad as it had been earlier in the year.