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00:00:00Blizzards, flooding, heat waves, storms and sub-zero temperatures, the British
00:00:14weather has them all to the extreme. We were tasked with rescuing people. When
00:00:21asked who, we were just told to save as many as you can. My first reaction was,
00:00:25God, they've done it. They've dropped the bomb. Over the past 75 years, we faced some of the
00:00:33most shocking weather events imaginable. In over 30 years with West Midlands Fire Service,
00:00:38I'd never really seen that before. Seven homes were lost to the sea. They just fell from the cliff
00:00:43edge. A nation going toe-to-toe with Mother Nature. To see people fighting for air was a harrowing
00:00:54experience you could imagine. And people with no other option than to tackle the most turbulent
00:01:00times head on. If something goes wrong for us, then there's nobody coming to rescue us, that's for
00:01:05sure. And fighting to survive Britain's most deadly weather. In February 2018, a deadly cold snap unleashed
00:01:19a snowstorm across the UK, plunging temperatures below minus 14 degrees Celsius, blowing snow into 10-foot
00:01:28high drifts. We had prolonged cold weather where the air came from the easterly direction from the near
00:01:34continent, brought sub-zero temperatures for this prolonged period of time. And it was down to this
00:01:39high pressure. So we normally have low pressure. That brings stormy conditions, wet and windy.
00:01:44But high pressure, it stops the weather from changing. It's basically like a force field. It
00:01:50stops anything moving out of its way. And we sat under this cold easterly winds over 10 days with
00:01:56record breaking temperatures and also record snowfall. In the northwest of England, farmers were among the
00:02:07hardest hit, facing the worst winter conditions many had ever known. I'm Paul Renison. I'm a hill
00:02:13farmer from Renwick, Penrith, Cumbria. And I live on a farm with my wife, Nick, and two daughters, Bella
00:02:22and Poppy. So our farm is at 800 meters. So the farmhouse is relatively high. It's probably one of the highest
00:02:30farmhouses in the Eden Valley. Nestled on the fell side, Nick and Paul's farm covered 360 acres, the same
00:02:39size as 200 football pitches, and was home to over 700 sheep and 80 cattle. Typical February day, we were
00:02:48feeding sheep. So we're rolling bales of haylage in, putting wing feeders over the top of them, bedding the
00:02:54sheep down. The weather we normally get in our area is there's generally a wind. We have very few
00:03:01completely still days. The wind is always there, but it's generally from the west.
00:03:09But on the 26th of February, a sudden shift in the polar jet stream caused the wind direction to flip,
00:03:16allowing super cold air from Russia to flow in. It came from this easterly direction. This is really
00:03:21unusual across the UK. And it was down to this thing called sudden stratospheric warming. Owing to this
00:03:27unusual feature, Britain's media named it the beast from the east. The stratosphere is normally very
00:03:34cold, but when it rapidly warms, the winds there, which are normally westerly, start to ease, and then
00:03:41they shift direction. They go easterly, and that happens all the way through the atmosphere, right the
00:03:46way down to the surface. After the stratosphere warms rapidly, we know that down on the surface,
00:03:50we will turn a lot colder.
00:03:56So we'd gone to bed that evening. Overnight, the wind had picked up, and we woke up to the sound of
00:04:02the wind.
00:04:05All you could hear was just this hellish wind outside. It sounded like Siberia. It just was howling.
00:04:11Everything was dark. The windows were completely covered in the snow. And it was then the realization
00:04:21that we had to kind of kick into action. At this moment, the Renaissance had 300 sheep on an exposed
00:04:28part of the hillside and 40 cows in their sheds. And with no power or running water and a blizzard raging
00:04:35outside, the farm was no place for a family to be. You couldn't really see very far, maybe, I don't know,
00:04:4110 foot in front of you. And it just looked complete white out. The noise, it was just incredibly
00:04:47inhospitable.
00:04:51The beast from the east bit hard. Thousands of schools were closed across the UK. Hundreds of motorists
00:04:57were stranded overnight on the M62 and M80 motorways. And the national grid issued a gas deficit warning,
00:05:05prompting fears of a shortage.
00:05:09Anything else coming in?
00:05:11Yeah, there's a few bits.
00:05:13And in Cumbria, help was being mobilized to villages cut off by the snow.
00:05:18So, Bay Search and Rescue is primarily a coastal rescue team. We operate right across Morecambe
00:05:25Bay. We also get involved in things like the massive snowstorms that the beast from the
00:05:30east created. Farming communities very quickly ran out of supplies. We picked up around about
00:05:37a ton and a half or two tons of food and basic essentials. For us, it was, we've got to get
00:05:43in there quickly, do the job before it gets any worse, and then come out.
00:05:53So that morning, we had a lot of cattle in sheds. And the sheds have Yorkshire boarding
00:05:59on, so strips of wood, which are used for ventilation, to get daylight in.
00:06:05The boards are sort of an inch or two apart from each other. And normally, that's enough
00:06:11to keep all the snow and the rain out and stuff. But this fine snow seemed to just blow
00:06:15in and get everywhere.
00:06:16And all the cattle were covered in snow. They were really, really cold. They couldn't get
00:06:24any shelter because it was just blowing in.
00:06:27Yeah, as a farmer, I've never seen anything like that before.
00:06:30In this particular part of the Pennines, there's this thing called the Helmwind. It's the only
00:06:36named wind across the whole of the UK. And when you get a persistent northeasterly wind
00:06:42hitting the Pennine Hill, going up and down the other side, it causes these clouds almost
00:06:47looking like helmets, hence the name Helm. You might think that the strongest winds happen
00:06:51on the side of the mountain that's facing the winds coming towards you, the windward side.
00:06:55But actually, the strongest winds happen on the other side, the leeward side. And the
00:07:00winds are so strong that it cannot walk us off their feet.
00:07:05And it was the Helmwind that was causing serious problems for Nick and Paul as they went head
00:07:10to head with its 60 mile per hour gusts.
00:07:15It was a blowing wind that was so, so strong that it took your breath away. So you were kind
00:07:21of breathing and then it would just whip it away.
00:07:25I remember we linked arms and we couldn't communicate with each other because you couldn't
00:07:29hear anything. And we walked across three or four fields to get to the sheep.
00:07:35We realised that we were just completely by ourselves. And you kind of go into survival
00:07:40mode.
00:08:11It was a little bit like a war scene where you've got soldiers just dropped everywhere.
00:08:27In that moment, you feel completely helpless. You've got their welfare. So you've got that
00:08:32kind of sentimental side of you. But you've also got the business side where you've got
00:08:37hundreds and hundreds and thousands of pounds just falling away. Some of them had just got
00:08:43too weak and they were just too cold. And you've got to just walk away. And that was really tough.
00:08:49The beast from the east had brought deep snow to large parts of Britain. Parts of the west
00:08:55of Scotland saw snowfall up to 50 centimetres, among the heaviest in recent memory. And the
00:09:02Met Office issued the first ever red warning of snow in England, forecasting a possible risk
00:09:07future life.
00:09:08A few inches of snow across Cumbria can bring the county to a standstill. But when you get
00:09:14a few feet in a few hours, then that's a different animal.
00:09:2060 or 70 mile an hour, gusting winds.
00:09:26Whiteouts where you had zero visibility.
00:09:29It was a frightening thing. And you're climbing over the fell tops to reach remote villages
00:09:36and hamlets. You literally are driving on 20 feet of snow. And then all of a sudden,
00:09:40it'll disappear.
00:09:41Get that guy back out of the way.
00:09:44The moment that you stood out of that vehicle, you knew you were in a different environment.
00:09:48And really a dangerous environment, you know.
00:09:50I'm going to turn this round here and abandon this route. I'm going to go around the other
00:09:55way and see if we can get him from there.
00:09:57At that stage, you begin to think, actually, can we see this through? And now we're going
00:10:02to be able to do what we've set out to do. And of course, if something goes wrong for
00:10:07us, then there's nobody coming to rescue us, that's for sure.
00:10:10These were some of the worst winter conditions that people had ever experienced in that part
00:10:17of Cumbria. Power lines came down, so many communities had no power at all. Some, because
00:10:23of the huge amount of snow, were completely cut off.
00:10:26Because of the combination of this biting wind coming from the east, adding in this
00:10:30helm wind, it brought these catastrophic amounts of snowfall and these exceptionally strong
00:10:35winds which caused widespread devastation.
00:10:38Transport networks collapsed and power lines were downed, bringing the country to a standstill.
00:10:44Panic buying emptied supermarket shelves, whilst the NHS faced surging demand and staff shortages.
00:10:51The biggest hurdle was getting up those farm lanes because the depth of snow was above the walls.
00:10:57Hello, are you all right? Everything's all right, is it? Yeah?
00:11:00My team actually climbed out of the vehicle and carried most of the stuff through the lanes and paths.
00:11:11When you've done your last drop off, then there's a sense of relief.
00:11:14After ten long, cold days, the beast from the east finally departed. This unwelcome visitor had been unprecedented, with snowfall and sub-zero temperatures on a scale not seen since 1991.
00:11:29It had cost the UK economy an estimated £1 billion a day and claimed the lives of ten people.
00:11:36We lost over 100 sheep in that snowdrift. I still think about it, but I've tried to put it out of my mind.
00:11:44Nowadays, our weather reports have got a lot more detailed. I look at it at least once a day, sometimes five or six, and then I'll make my management decisions around the weather forecast.
00:11:56When the storm had passed, you've kind of got this hangover, you're exhausted.
00:12:01I think the beast from the east made me realise how powerful nature is, how powerful the weather can be, how damaging it can be, and that it needs to be respected.
00:12:26The winter of 2013 and 14 was the stormiest the UK had ever seen. A powerful jet stream sent one Atlantic storm after another crashing into the country.
00:12:43Just before winter began, in late October, a deadly storm hit southern England, in which four people lost their lives, more than 600,000 homes were left without power, and hundreds of trains and flights were cancelled.
00:12:56We had 12 storms pummeling the UK, torrential amounts of rainfall with huge storm surges, and it was the wettest winter that England and Wales have recorded since records began in 1766.
00:13:10And as the year drew to an end, the bad weather only intensified. It all began on December the 5th, with the coastlines of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk bearing the brunt of this deadly weather.
00:13:23In 2013, I was living in a town called Hemsby, in Norfolk, with my wife Jackie, and we lived there for seven years until the sea surge.
00:13:36David Whiteley is a journalist who was working as a local news reporter in Norfolk during this particularly stormy winter.
00:13:43This sand dune is all that's between the North Sea and these houses behind me.
00:13:48We'd been commissioned to make a short documentary about the sea defences that people wanted to build in Hemsby, because they were terribly concerned about the rate of erosion on the Norfolk coast.
00:14:01We came to speak to a couple who literally were living on the edge, living, their houses built on one of the sand dunes.
00:14:08We were happy there. Just behind our place, all we had was just a footpath, a sand dune, and then it was the beach.
00:14:15And many a time we sat on top of the sand dunes just looking out to the sea.
00:14:21But Stephen and Jackie's idyllic beach home was under constant threat from the weather and the North Sea.
00:14:28The cliffs at Hemsby are eroding because the rock here is really very soft.
00:14:32And whenever you have a storm, it's just battering away at that soft rock, undercutting the cliffs, and then they will just collapse.
00:14:40We were getting worried about it. We even tried to sell our house. We couldn't sell it.
00:14:46We even dropped the price right down. We still couldn't sell it. Couldn't get rid.
00:14:52The destructive power of the sea was something people living along the Norfolk coast were all too used to, with the area's relatively flat landscape and closeness to the shoreline making it especially vulnerable to severe weather like storms, strong winds and snow.
00:15:09My name's Daniel Heard and I'm the coxswain for the Hemsby lifeboat.
00:15:15Been volunteering for the lifeboat for about 23 years now. We get called out to all sorts of jobs. Broken down vessels, injuries, cardiac arrest.
00:15:25There's a lot we do within the village, like with snowfalls and people getting stuck. We make sure that we're there to help them out so they don't come in harm's way.
00:15:37On the 5th of December 2013, we had a low pressure system causing a storm surge to move down the east coast.
00:15:49The weather reports saying it was going to be a big storm. We were expecting it on that day. We didn't think it was going to be as bad as what it was.
00:15:57We just thought it wasn't going to really impact what we were doing too much. That all changed.
00:16:09The North Sea, the one thing that had attracted Stephen and Jackie to Hemsby, was about to pummel the east coast of England with the biggest tidal surge in more than 60 years.
00:16:21The Environment Agency issued 30 severe sludge warnings. That is the highest level that they had ever issued.
00:16:27It was all the way from Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk up to Lincolnshire.
00:16:31In excess of 2 metres above the normal sea level around parts of Norfolk, having devastating impacts.
00:16:41We were filming with Jackie and Steve and I remember filming a piece to camera around their house and the wind had really got up.
00:16:47It felt really strong and it steadily got worse from there.
00:16:53Storm surges happen when we have a low pressure weather system and that low pressure sucks up the surface of the sea.
00:17:00We also have high winds, strong winds associated with that low pressure system and lashing the coast as well, making that water even higher.
00:17:08And then on top of that, we have a spring tide. So that's when we have the earth and the moon and the sun all lined up in a line.
00:17:15And that gravitational pull will pull even more water than a normal high tide onto the land.
00:17:22And as soon as you've got all three and the direction of wind northeasterly, that's where you're going to be hammered.
00:17:29And unfortunately, that's what happened that night.
00:17:33The type of beach you've got here is actually quite small.
00:17:36A bigger beach can absorb lots of the energy from the waves, from the storms.
00:17:41But here, because it's a narrow beach, the waves can get straight at the cliffs.
00:17:45It was like having a 14 ton machine just hit it within like 10 minutes and demolishing it.
00:17:53There was an old concrete lifeboat station that had been on the beach at Hemsby for many, many years.
00:17:59Sand underneath it was being eroded by the storm surge and parts of it were crumbling away until, you know, the whole walls were collapsing.
00:18:06And all of a sudden it just started to disappear.
00:18:08The lifeboat hut is literally tipping into the sea.
00:18:15To see what was happening and unfolding in front of my eyes, it was er, yeah, it was heartbreaking really.
00:18:22To see the time and the effort that had been put into that lifeboat station and er, just to see it destroyed in the matter of hours.
00:18:32Well, we went down to the pub to raise money for sea defences.
00:18:35The governor of the pub come round and said, Steve, you better get back.
00:18:38The sea's coming in.
00:18:39So we're taking out the lifeboat station.
00:18:41It's getting very, very close to yours.
00:18:43When I heard that the lifeboat station had gone, I knew it must have been pretty strong because the lifeboat station was actually on bricks.
00:18:48It weren't just on sand.
00:18:51Steve was very anxious to check the house to see what was going on.
00:18:55So we walked up and still I thought, we're going to get there.
00:18:59It's going to be fine.
00:19:00We'll say cheerio.
00:19:01We'll see you tomorrow.
00:19:02We've just come along Jackie's road and the house next door, which has actually been condemned anyway.
00:19:07Half, half of the house is gone.
00:19:09We literally were walking up the, the kind of slope up the driveway to their, to their house.
00:19:15And we heard someone at the front say, the back's gone.
00:19:20Our house was hanging over the side and the walk was rushing underneath our house, like a raging river.
00:19:25Not going in and out like the tide does, like a raging river.
00:19:28Jackie's saying, what are we going to do?
00:19:30What are we going to do?
00:19:31What are we going to do?
00:19:32Oh yeah.
00:19:33She, she was panicking.
00:19:38Jackie said, we could be homeless tomorrow.
00:19:40They were the truest words she ever said because we were homeless the following day.
00:19:44I can't believe this has happened.
00:19:46Jackie was just inconsolable.
00:19:48Steve was in shock.
00:19:49What was very amazing was how everyone in him has been rallied round.
00:19:55You could never see so many people down here turning out at like 12 o'clock at night, loading vehicles up.
00:20:01That was just amazing.
00:20:03And to see people just get to Hemsby to help out.
00:20:06You could just see how everyone was pulling together.
00:20:08People who don't even know formed a human chain and got what they could out furniture-wise
00:20:12and took it back to the pub for safekeeping.
00:20:15And at this point, it wasn't just the building in danger of going over the cliff edge.
00:20:20It was people too.
00:20:22Seeing the properties going in and seeing some of the crew going in to making sure these properties were empty.
00:20:28I remember we having ropes around ourself.
00:20:31People at one end outside the door holding onto that rope.
00:20:35I think that was a little bit, a bit scary because I'm thinking not knowing whether that property is going to end up going over with you in it.
00:20:43I'll never forget it to this day.
00:20:46You could literally hear the wood splintering.
00:20:49And we looked in.
00:20:52And the floor was lifting up.
00:20:54And bearing in mind there are several people in the house trying to get things out.
00:20:58And everyone's shouting, out, out, out. Everyone get out, everyone get out.
00:21:01The shout went out. Everybody out. The place is going to go.
00:21:06And then we heard this gut-wrenching crack.
00:21:11And I saw the house cracking off and I heard it crack.
00:21:16What?
00:21:17And the bottom half went down. It was frightening just how fast it happened.
00:21:22If it had happened later in the night, I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now.
00:21:34The most severe storm surge in 60 years caused widespread disruption across Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, leaving behind an estimated £1 billion worth of damage.
00:21:45We came back to Hemsby at first light to see what happened overnight.
00:21:52That's when the realisation kicked in that it had been a very dangerous situation the night before.
00:21:58And to see houses stream down the sides of sand dunes and the remnants of the lifeboat station.
00:22:06It was like something out of a film.
00:22:10There were seven houses lost that night where so much sand had gone.
00:22:15So much of the dunes had gone from underneath them.
00:22:18The speed was just unbelievable.
00:22:20That sea search came in and took so much out and done so much damage in such little time.
00:22:26Jack, you're looking at me, this is just...
00:22:29Yeah.
00:22:30It's unreal.
00:22:31That's the living room, that is.
00:22:32Yeah, it was the living room.
00:22:35I've never seen anything like it.
00:22:37And then the stark reality hits and you look over the side and you can see the North Sea.
00:22:45And I remember coming down here and it just looked like a war zone.
00:22:51The whole beach was covered in debris, concrete, parts of a lifeboat shed.
00:22:57And just walking around, just seeing the damage it had caused.
00:23:01Yeah, it was just unbelievable.
00:23:06During the storm surge, because of the inundation in water, which was forecast for some but came unexpectedly for others.
00:23:11The devastation was widespread and it cost a billion pounds in damage.
00:23:19I never thought I'd experience losing me out to the sea.
00:23:26The look on Jackie's face.
00:23:28I wouldn't like to see that on anyone's face again.
00:23:30Even to this day, my mental health and looking back, reflecting back on it, you know, that does play on your mind.
00:23:39Because this sort of sea erosion is still going on down here.
00:23:43People are still losing their houses.
00:23:45In 2004, the quiet Cornish village of Boscastle was overwhelmed by a flash flood of devastating force.
00:24:00In August that year, the village experienced relentless rain in 12 out of the first 14 days of the month.
00:24:20On the morning of the 16th, local press photographer Emily Whitfield-Wicks was working close by.
00:24:29Boscastle is a really quaint little fishing village.
00:24:34It's really, really beautifully set down in the valley at the bottom of a river that flows out through the harbour and out to sea.
00:24:44It's a very, very popular tourist site.
00:24:46Melanie Graham and my husband and I and our three children were on holiday in Cornwall, staying in our caravan.
00:24:55The weather on August the 16th was sunny and bright in the morning, and we visited Tintagel Castle.
00:25:03Then we decided we'd pop into Boscastle, kind of on our way home.
00:25:08Despite a bright start to the day, by late morning, things had started to change.
00:25:13There were a few black clouds around, but nothing significant.
00:25:17When we arrived, we drove over the little bridge, round and into the car park.
00:25:22We found a space, sort of like right alongside the river.
00:25:26Walked down the car park, and we found ourselves in the visitor centre.
00:25:30So we went in there, we had a look around, and then the rain started coming down.
00:25:34Just minutes after stepping into the visitor centre, a thunderstorm rolled in, marking the start of a downpour that would dump almost 200 millimetres of rain in just 24 hours across parts of Cornwall.
00:25:46The rain just got harder and harder, and more and more water was now no longer going down the river, but coming down the car park.
00:25:56It was getting heavier and heavier, and we realised the river had burst its banks.
00:26:02We began to get a bit scared at that point.
00:26:03Flash floods can happen very, very quickly, sometimes in a matter of minutes.
00:26:11Sometimes it's not even raining where it floods.
00:26:14The geography of Boscastle is really important.
00:26:19We've got the main river, the Valancy, joined by two other smaller rivers.
00:26:23This is a steep-sided valley, and it has impermeable rocks, which means the water cannot soak in and rush it straight off, down the valley, downstream.
00:26:34On the day of the flood, two billion litres of water rushed through Boscastle.
00:26:42I got a phone call from the Cornish Guardian reporter.
00:26:45He said there's a flood in the Boscastle car park, and can you go and check it out?
00:26:49When I arrived, you could see that everything was becoming more and more crazy, weather-wise, and there was just something not right.
00:26:58It was still raining very, very heavily, so I parked at the top of Boscastle and walked down the road that snakes down into the village.
00:27:08We were sheltering in the visitor centre, and we could see that the river now was no longer contained within the river banks or whatever.
00:27:16It had come over the side of the bank and was now heading down the car park.
00:27:22The water started to come into the visitor centre, and we saw cars actually moving in the car park, being pushed by the water into other cars.
00:27:30This was now a fast-moving situation. The Environment Agency had already issued a flood alert for the village, and emergency services were being dispatched, including a search-and-rescue helicopter from nearby Royal Navy Air Station, Cold Rose.
00:27:47My name's Bobby Omens. I was the winch operator back in 2004 during the Boscastle floods. On that day, we got the call through saying that there was an incident at Boscastle.
00:28:01We were not expecting anything other than a little bit of flooding. We flew up the coast, expecting to see the village as we come round the headland, but the first thing we noticed was the discoloration of the sea.
00:28:14Large amounts of sediment and debris carried by the floodwaters had caused the sea to turn a chocolate-brown colour.
00:28:21This was a dirty flash flood. It was all of that water, plus all of the debris that it had picked up. It was cars, it was flowerpots, it was mud, all powerfully moving through Boscastle, destroying bridges, destroying homes, rushing into shops.
00:28:39As we rounded the corner and you could see the devastation starting to unfold, it then started to get a bit more serious and a bit more worrying.
00:28:49And the radio calls asked us to literally search the harbour area and fly up the valley into the town looking to see if any of the cars or if there was anybody within the surface water that we could actually rescue.
00:29:04At that time of year, the village hosted approximately 1,000 visitors alongside 1,000 local residents, all of whom found themselves at risk within just 15 minutes of Bob's search and rescue team receiving the call.
00:29:17So as I came around the corner at the bottom of the hill, it suddenly looked like a tsunami. I was, I just stood there in shock.
00:29:30The car floating over there, look. That blue car is floating.
00:29:35The river had become, it was just this torrential torrent of water running through the village.
00:29:44So my instincts kicked in. I proceeded to take photographs.
00:29:49So in the visitor's centre at the time there was 12 of us. There was my family of five, another family of five, and then the lady who was working in the shop and her assistant.
00:30:05Once the water in the visitor's centre had got up to kind of, you know, a calf level, and it was still rising, we began to get a bit scared at that point.
00:30:16We decided we needed to evacuate. The lady who was running the shop suggested we went up the loft ladder because it was dry up there.
00:30:29So whilst we were in the loft of the visitor's centre, we could hear the noise of the river and we could see large trees going down the river.
00:30:36Then we heard a massive crash and the whole building shook. A tree had actually come down the river, smashed into the visitor centre.
00:30:47And it was at that point we realised that it was no longer safe to stay in the visitor centre.
00:30:53What I was seeing was just surreal.
00:30:56There was a torrent of water going down through the street, carrying cars with it out to sea.
00:31:03The car park was just an ocean of water. There's buildings that were disappearing. It was just chaos everywhere.
00:31:13By now there were seven Navy Coast Guard and Air Ambulance helicopters buzzing around the sky above Boscastle, making an already dangerous rescue operation even more difficult.
00:31:25Boscastle being in a steep sided valley made it very awkward for any more than one or maybe two aircraft to be lying abreast.
00:31:36Not only that, you had electric wires going across the valley. So we were obviously keeping our eyes out for those and dodging those.
00:31:44The river Valancy had become a three meter high wall of water which was rushing through the village at a staggering 40 miles per hour.
00:31:55Boscastle had become an extremely hostile environment.
00:31:58So while we were in the loft of the visitor centre, we could hear these helicopters going overhead.
00:32:07Over the radio, the question was asked, who do you want us to save? And the answer to come back was, just save who you can.
00:32:15Helicopters seem to be coming in and out, flying through the valley and not coming to us. So nobody seemed to know we were there.
00:32:23In a desperate attempt to be rescued, those stranded in the visitor centre made a dangerous decision to go outside onto the roof.
00:32:32It was a slight, very slippery roof. So one of the dads went up and straddled at the top and then Alan passed the children one by one out of the window and up to the other dad.
00:32:44It was raining. It was cold. We were shivering. But while we were on the roof, gradually more and more aircraft were coming over our heads.
00:32:55As we were flying up the valley, I got my head out the window and I could see these people on the roof.
00:33:02They'd actually spotted Rebecca on the roof wearing a pink, bright pink fleece.
00:33:10You immediately assume that if it's a pink coloured coat, it's obviously female or a child.
00:33:16But they stood out because they were sat on the roof of the building, just hanging on for grim death in the wind and rain.
00:33:22On the day of the flood, we had 75 millimetres falling in two hours. That's an awful lot of rain. That's normally what we would see falling in August in this area.
00:33:35Now the rain was torrential and it hurt your body when it hit you.
00:33:44Our helmets got very wet because we've got our heads out the door looking for people.
00:33:49And it quickly, your intercom microphones on the helmets got saturated, which become crackly.
00:33:56So we then had to resort to using hand signals.
00:34:00A helicopter did finally turn up and stopped over the top of us.
00:34:06The winch man came down and he landed right next to me.
00:34:14So there were six children. He took all the children first.
00:34:18Then he came back down and then started winching the ladies.
00:34:22Graduates, they're all going up. I'm feeling, yes, another one gone, another one's safe.
00:34:27So it looks like we're going to get out of this.
00:34:30And I was the last person to be taken up into the aircraft.
00:34:32I think the first part of feeling safe is when we, all five of us, were in that helicopter.
00:34:46The Boscastle flood is very interesting because it was so violent and we don't often see flash floods in the UK.
00:34:57They're very dramatic indeed. When we see people being rescued by helicopter and that shows that it's a rare event.
00:35:02Five hours of torrential rain caused over 2 million tonnes of water to rush through Boscastle and the surrounding areas of North Cornwall.
00:35:11My biggest memory, if you like, of the whole event was how nobody lost their lives and makes you immensely proud.
00:35:21One thing that Bob said to us afterwards was that it was a very unusual rescue.
00:35:29So normally they're rescuing people, someone's gone out in the windsurf, they've done something wrong and they've got into trouble and then they've had to be rescued.
00:35:35He said, you were just literally in the wrong place at the wrong time.
00:35:38As shocking as that day was, I think the impact on me is seeing how people do come together.
00:35:48There is a true Cornish spirit that comes out in situations like that.
00:35:53I think as a family since then we've, you know, we're very close.
00:36:01We frequently talk about Boscastle.
00:36:05You know, it makes you think how great, you know, family life is and to make that your priority really.
00:36:13Overall, the floods caused an estimated 50 million pounds worth of damage.
00:36:17More than 60 buildings were seriously affected and four completely destroyed.
00:36:23Dozens of vehicles were washed into the sea and over 100 people were airlifted to safety in the biggest peacetime rescue mission ever seen on mainland Britain.
00:36:47In 1987, weather forecasters warned of a major storm that was set to hit by the 15th of October.
00:36:56But as the date neared, the threat seemed to fade.
00:36:59In the five days leading up to the great storm, we were tracking an extra tropical low pressure area that had come across warm waters heading to the UK.
00:37:08And we knew it was going to collide with some cold air coming from the Arctic.
00:37:11But the trap was going to take it much further south from the UK, just clipping the far south coast, maybe, but also affecting France.
00:37:20But the forecast in the end went very wrong.
00:37:28My name is David Tyler and I was the electrical engineer officer on board the MV Hengist cross-channel ferry.
00:37:34On the 15th of October, I joined the ship as usual at 6.45 in the morning.
00:37:40Our plan that day was the same as every day to do six crossings of the channel, three round trips to Boulogne and lay back at night.
00:37:48By the afternoon of the 15th of October, the UK was calm.
00:37:53But out over the Bay of Biscay, trouble was brewing.
00:37:57Now we'd had this low pressure coming from warm waters, meeting some very cold air coming from the Arctic.
00:38:03So the energy that this had, combined with the cold air coming, this big temperature gradient between the two,
00:38:09I mean, it gave it loads of power.
00:38:10So we had an extra tropical storm heading to the UK and not a hurricane.
00:38:14My name is Bob Ogley and I was the editor of the local newspaper in Sevenoaks, the Sevenoaks Chronicle.
00:38:28On the night of October the 15th, I decided to walk to the pub.
00:38:33The landlord immediately said to me, did you walk? And I said, yes. He said, well, don't walk home. It could be dangerous. We're going to have a very wild and windy night.
00:38:46He showed me his barometer and the pressure had fallen dramatically.
00:38:52And then he came up with the words I will never forget. He said, ignore anything that Michael Fish said on the television.
00:38:59Good afternoon to you. Earlier on today, apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she heard that there was a hurricane on the way.
00:39:05Well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't.
00:39:10I first noticed that the weather was deteriorating late afternoon, early evening.
00:39:16The wind was blowing harder and harder and faster and faster.
00:39:20It took quite a long time to get the vessel back into Folkestone from the return of the second crossing.
00:39:25What is normally a 15 minute exercise took almost four hours.
00:39:31When we got back into Folkestone, it was decided that we would cancel the third round trip that day and just lay over.
00:39:37By midnight, the storm had reached the Western English Channel and by 1.35am on the 16th of October, warnings were out for winds as strong as force 11 gales.
00:39:47We were woken up about 2 o'clock by what sounded like an express train coming into the bedroom.
00:39:58We looked out of the window. The whole of the night sky was illuminated.
00:40:03My first reaction was, God, they've done it. They've dropped the bomb.
00:40:11And they were actually trees falling onto power cables and these giant flashes were lighting up the sky.
00:40:20My immediate thought was, the children are in a bedroom quite close to a window.
00:40:30There's a big tree outside and I've got to move them.
00:40:34So I took the children downstairs.
00:40:36The moment we got into the front room, I made a cup of tea, but the thing I remember clearly was the cup in the saucer actually rattling because the wind was getting into the conservatory.
00:40:51It was a storm of an incredible ferocity, attacking the house and fading and attacking again.
00:40:59Around the coast, several locations had winds of 100 miles an hour.
00:41:04And at Shoreham, at 10 past three in the morning, our peak gust of wind, 115 miles an hour.
00:41:11That's the equivalent to a category three hurricane.
00:41:15And in Folkestone Harbour, the stormy winds were whipping up the sea into a dangerous frenzy.
00:41:22It was high tide, so the ship was getting buffeted and battered against the harbour wall.
00:41:25And we were also parting mooring lines and wires.
00:41:28And the mooring lines were as thick as your forearm.
00:41:30They were literally just snapping.
00:41:32So we couldn't really keep the ship against the jetty arm because the ship was getting damaged.
00:41:37And that's when the captain made the decision to head out to sea just to ride the storm out.
00:41:45We only knew we were out in the open sea because of the waves.
00:41:49And we took an almighty wave over the ship's bow.
00:41:52We listered over to the port side and we just rocked as we went.
00:41:58It was like shuddered.
00:41:59We shuddered to port and then back to starboard.
00:42:02The atmosphere in the engine control room at this point was getting quite tense.
00:42:08I looked at the others.
00:42:09I think we were all thinking the same thing.
00:42:11Someone from the engine room needed to go outside on deck to make sure nothing had been damaged.
00:42:19And it was David who bravely volunteered.
00:42:23When I went up to check the emergency generator, I went out into the boat deck and I heard wind like I've never ever heard in my life.
00:42:32It was shrieking, screaming.
00:42:35It was so severe, so strong, those winds.
00:42:39It instilled fear into me.
00:42:43We took another wave over the bow.
00:42:47The effect of that wave started a chain of events.
00:42:51We lost the two remaining generators, which caused us to lose the two main engines.
00:42:54And that's how we ended up with no power.
00:42:57That was scary.
00:42:59That was scary, just drifting.
00:43:03So you couldn't see anything at all on land.
00:43:06You had no idea where you were before the captain called us up to the bridge.
00:43:11And he said, I think it would be apt now to say a prayer.
00:43:14When the captain said that, hit home how dire our situation actually was.
00:43:20And I prayed.
00:43:25We could feel ourselves running aground.
00:43:28I was scared.
00:43:29I was scared for my life.
00:43:33Then we saw the sun come up.
00:43:35And we realised where we were.
00:43:40It was such a relief to see land.
00:43:43We perched on a concrete groin.
00:43:46We were pretty sure that we were hard and fast there.
00:43:48We weren't going anywhere.
00:43:49Just relief.
00:43:50Just relief that we knew we were going to get home that day and see our families.
00:43:54Quite soon after that, Kent Fire and Rescue showed up and they got us off the vessel, which we were very, very grateful for.
00:44:01You could see this hull, which was in excess of 32 feet long, just torn open in the side of the ship, which you could get the proverbial double-decker bus through.
00:44:09People woke up to this widespread devastation, scenes that were just completely unimaginable.
00:44:17The deadly weather event affected much of England, with the storm's path starting in the south coast of the country before moving north and reaching the Humber estuary.
00:44:26The great storm was the most catastrophic to hit the UK in 300 years.
00:44:32And Douglas Heard, who was the Home Secretary at the time, described it as the worst night since the Blitz.
00:44:38At first light, I opened the front door, and to my astonishment, the woodlands had gone.
00:44:56I remember there was a tree down, and I climbed on the trunk, and I was looking south, and I realised my car had gone.
00:45:05It was under an oak tree, and it was completely flattened.
00:45:09In just a few hours, the storm had caused billions of pounds worth of damage and left hundreds of thousands without power.
00:45:18Roads, railways and airports were all brought to a halt by falling trees.
00:45:24There were no cars on the road at all. There were no aeroplanes in the sky.
00:45:29There was no one around. So it was an eerie, unusual morning.
00:45:35I remember neighbours staring in disbelief of the world they'd seen the day before had completely changed.
00:45:46In the lead-up to the great storm, it had been pretty wet.
00:45:49So the ground was quite soggy, meaning that the roots had room to move.
00:45:53Then we were pummeled and pummeled and pummeled from one direction, and the trees were in full leaf, meaning they'd catch all of that wind.
00:45:59And then as the main storm went through, that band of rain, the wind direction changed, meaning all of the trees would have fallen very easily compared to just a normal spell of wet and windy weather.
00:46:09As the sheer scale of the storm's aftermath started to become clear, there was a strong appetite for news up and down the UK.
00:46:18The first thing I remember thinking is, I've got to get the reporters out into the villages to see what's happened.
00:46:29Until it occurred to me that every single road in and out of the town of Sevenoaks was blocked.
00:46:35And with phone lines down and a serious lack of transport, getting word out was extremely challenging.
00:46:42And we decided, let's try and hire an aeroplane.
00:46:45We managed to talk to the proprietor of a flying school at Biggan Hill.
00:46:51His first reaction was, most of my planes are flipped over, they're all damaged.
00:46:56And then he said, I've got one that might be OK.
00:46:59I wasn't sure about the words, might be.
00:47:02But he said, if you can get here, we'll have a go.
00:47:06The sight from the air was absolutely extraordinary.
00:47:11Even a Bedgebury forest had collapsed.
00:47:15Tunbridge was flooded.
00:47:17Knoll Park, there were trees sort of been stripped of all the branches and all the leaves.
00:47:23They looked like mounted guns pointing at the sky.
00:47:25The storm prompted huge improvements in the science and communication of weather forecasting.
00:47:39And the discovery of a new weather phenomena.
00:47:42The sting jet.
00:47:43A sting jet. It's where you have winds come from the mid troposphere.
00:47:48They come all the way down to the surface.
00:47:50And it's this narrow funnel of air with winds of in excess of 100 miles an hour that comes down.
00:47:55And it's called a sting jet because it has a little hook at the bottom, a curl, just like the sting in the tail of a scorpion.
00:48:00When I sense bad weather, I do revisit the great storm because I know, I know what the weather can do.
00:48:11I know what Mother Nature is capable of.
00:48:12I don't think everybody does grasp that until you've seen it firsthand.
00:48:18And I would say I saw it firsthand that night, but was lucky enough to escape it.
00:48:2418 people sadly lost their lives during the evening of the 15th and early morning of the 16th of October, 1987.
00:48:34The great storm ravaged the British countryside, leaving scars that live on even today.
00:48:39The storm was an event that changed a lot of lives.
00:48:46We filled the newspaper up with stories and pictures, recollections of that night, interviewing scores and scores of people to hear their recollections.
00:49:00The great storm of 1987 is synonymous with the UK and extreme weather.
00:49:05I feel like the majority of people in the UK will remember it, not least because the weather forecaster got it wrong, but because it was so extreme.
00:49:13On the 5th of December 1952, a thick yellow-black vapour descended on London.
00:49:15On the 5th of December 1952, a thick yellow-black vapour descended on London.
00:49:17The capital was gripped by something far greater than weather that would bring the city to sleep.
00:49:21On the 5th of December 1952, a thick yellow-black vapour descended on London.
00:49:43The capital was gripped by something far greater than weather that would bring the city to its knees.
00:49:48A toxic blanket of smoke and fog, smog.
00:49:55But the reason for this deadly event lay not just in the skies, but in the city itself.
00:50:03London sits in a natural geographical basin surrounded by hills,
00:50:08and its air holds more moisture because of the River Thames running through it.
00:50:13So this encourages a phenomenon known as a temperature inversion,
00:50:16where warm air rises higher in the atmosphere and traps the cold air beneath it.
00:50:21And often a temperature inversion is accompanied by fog.
00:50:24Early December 1952 was bitterly cold,
00:50:28and an area of high pressure known as an anti-cyclone sat across the southeast of England.
00:50:33This caused a blanket of warm, moist air to stall over London, pushing it towards the ground.
00:50:38And there, the cold winter temperatures condensed the water vapour in the air into fog,
00:50:44and this trapped pollution over the city.
00:50:48In an attempt to combat the freezing conditions,
00:50:51many Londoners burnt large amounts of coal,
00:50:54releasing smoke and sulphur dioxide into the air.
00:50:57Within hours, visibility dropped across the city
00:51:00as deadly smog descended and started to choke London.
00:51:03My name is Dr. Brian Commins.
00:51:07I was 22 in 1952.
00:51:12I live in a place called Ickenham near Uxbridge.
00:51:15I was an undergraduate.
00:51:17I believe it was below zero in London for at least two days.
00:51:22This is the worst fog in London's history.
00:51:25Even the traditional fog flares do little against the smoke-laden blanket 500 feet thick.
00:51:30The pollution stabilised the wet fog.
00:51:34And of course, when it would last for several days, as it did in 1952,
00:51:39that was an extreme problem.
00:51:42I'm Peter Farrell Vinay.
00:51:44In 1952, I was six years old and living in South London.
00:51:49I don't think we ever thought about the environmental effect of burning all this coal.
00:51:55It was just something we'd always done.
00:52:00When you burn coal, it releases sulphur dioxide into the air.
00:52:05And this sulphur dioxide, if it combines with mist or water droplets in the air,
00:52:10creates sulphuric acid.
00:52:11My name is Jennifer Bromfield.
00:52:16In 1952, I was eight years old and living in South London in Mitcham.
00:52:23There was just no escaping smoke.
00:52:25Coal fires did create smoke, which again contributed to smog.
00:52:32Weather was colder in those days.
00:52:35There was a lot more snow than we tend to have now.
00:52:39By the evening of the 5th, they'd realised it was growing very thick.
00:52:44And by the morning of the 6th, it really was a state of emergency.
00:52:51By day two, the layer of smog which had formed over London was up to 200 metres deep,
00:52:57covered 1,000 square miles, and it was going nowhere.
00:53:01The big smoke had become the big smog.
00:53:04Smog was vastly different to fog.
00:53:08Smog smelt.
00:53:11Breathing it in wasn't very pleasant.
00:53:13You could feel it going through or down your throat.
00:53:17It did catch your breath.
00:53:20You couldn't breathe easily when it was so thick with smog.
00:53:25It was smelt not pleasantly and tasted.
00:53:29A sort of acidic taste, I'd say.
00:53:31I mean, people were coughing in the street.
00:53:33By Sunday, the 7th of December, the deadly smog was so dense and polluted that it was affecting homes and public spaces.
00:53:45The one disadvantage of a coal fire, it needs air.
00:53:50So where does it get that air?
00:53:51It has to draw it in and it came from outside.
00:53:54So the house had poor quality air drawn into the home.
00:53:58This smog is going everywhere.
00:54:01A lot of the smogs before, you could close your door and it wouldn't get inside.
00:54:05Now, it's like this terrible ghostly presence.
00:54:09Whatever you do, you cannot shut it out of your house.
00:54:12I opened the door, went into the hall and looked over at the letterbox and the smog was pouring through it like a stream of water.
00:54:24So it was coming out of a dam and it was sort of green and grey colour, quite foul.
00:54:30So my mother came back, oh my God, and stuffed the cushion in the letterbox.
00:54:34But by that time, it had formed a sort of small pool on the floor.
00:54:43Hospitals had become overwhelmed with patients suffering from breathing difficulties,
00:54:47with as many as 900 deaths per day attributed to the immediate effects of the smog at its peak.
00:54:53Every day the smog persisted, 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid formed in the atmosphere.
00:54:58The result of almost 400 tonnes of sulphur dioxide belched from the chimneys across London.
00:55:05Add to that 1,000 tonnes of smoke particles and you've got the recipe for one of the worst air pollution events in recorded history.
00:55:14Seeing people fighting for air and breathing in dirty air.
00:55:21But I shall never, ever forget that.
00:55:24The evening news reported that livestock at Smithfield Market had died of asphyxiation.
00:55:30And by day four, the entire population of the nation's capital simply could not see what was around them.
00:55:37The smog made it so impossible to see where you were going that people were lost in an instant.
00:55:44I wanted to cross a road and I became very disoriented.
00:55:48And after a few minutes, I wasn't sure what was happening.
00:55:50And I ended up on the same side of the road as I started.
00:55:54Public transport did run, but again, only with great caution.
00:56:01Buses had great difficulty getting along.
00:56:05People had flares so the buses could see where to go.
00:56:10In the beam of light from a vehicle, you could see the swirling of the smog within that beam.
00:56:20You couldn't see the fence, which was three metres away from the window.
00:56:25You could barely see the window ledge.
00:56:27It was as if somebody had gone and just painted the window grey.
00:56:30After five long days, the weather in the south-east changed.
00:56:39The blocking high pressure finally broke down, allowing Atlantic weather systems to freshen up the conditions and to disperse the choking air.
00:56:47The great smog wasn't just inconvenient, it was also incredibly poisonous and harmful to health.
00:56:55In total, it's estimated that as many as 12,000 people died as a direct result of its effects in December 1952.
00:57:04And in the months and years that followed, more than 100,000 people suffered long-lasting respiratory diseases attributed to the great smog.
00:57:13Even though the smog had gone, it left its deadly effects behind.
00:57:17It left its dirt behind.
00:57:19Houses, buildings, streets were covered in soot and smog.
00:57:22But it also left its dirt in the lungs of people.
00:57:26Londoners breathed a collective sigh of relief, but this was by no means the end of the story.
00:57:31My mother suffered from a chest condition that made breathing difficult at the best of times.
00:57:38If there was a smog, then her breathing was extremely difficult.
00:57:44There were a few times when she did get admitted to hospital.
00:57:50In the east end of London, where it was poorer and more crowded, but there were also more factories,
00:57:56the death rate for this time in December was nine times higher than it ordinarily should be.
00:58:01In the London smog of 1952, 4,000 people died within a few days.
00:58:06The death toll and the filth rose together.
00:58:09Many years later that I read up a little bit about the smog
00:58:13and the number of people who died as a direct result of that smog.
00:58:18And that was appalling.
00:58:19It was this gigantic, poisonous smog in 1952 that transformed the attitudes of the British
00:58:28people and the politicians.
00:58:31This was only five days of smog and it killed 12,000 people.
00:58:36You couldn't have a greater sign to the politicians that the day of coal is over.
00:58:42In late July 2005, warm, humid air settled over the Midlands, while cooler air pushed
00:59:08in from the south-west. When the two met, it sparked some heavy, thundery showers across the Midlands and East Anglia.
00:59:16In Balsall Heath, two miles south of Birmingham city centre, Ejaz Udin was at home.
00:59:22On that particular day, I'd actually just come back from living abroad.
00:59:26So I was unpacking, generally recovering from jet lag.
00:59:31Four miles away at the Yardley crematorium, David Lane was just finishing work for the day.
00:59:38I was living in Sparkbrook at the time.
00:59:41It was quite early in the afternoon, I mean 2.30, 2.45, and I saw the sky going dark.
00:59:49You don't normally get the sky going dark at that time.
00:59:51I was actually in my bedroom when I first got an inkling that something was going wrong.
00:59:58It started to get dark.
01:00:00The temperature changed, the atmosphere changed.
01:00:04It became very humid.
01:00:07Very unusual, very surreal.
01:00:10It just felt electric.
01:00:12And that's when I realised that something was wrong.
01:00:14I was driving home from work and felt the rear of my car lifting on the suspension.
01:00:24Unbeknownst to the people of Birmingham, unsettled thunderstorms across the city were about to collide warm, humid air with cold, dry air.
01:00:33Ideal conditions for a tornado to form.
01:00:36So the warm air rises through the cold air, creating a violently whirling mass of air called a vortex.
01:00:43As the turning vortex draws in more warm air from the moving thunderstorms, its speed increases.
01:00:50If it continues to stretch and intensify, the vortex may touch the ground, and at this point it becomes a tornado.
01:00:56I was just driving along, and suddenly the sky's darkened, cars buffeting about.
01:01:07What on earth's happening?
01:01:09The air seemed to be straight enough full of grass clippings.
01:01:14And then I looked up.
01:01:16A blue double-bed mattress flying through the air at about 30 feet up.
01:01:20I just sort of stared outside.
01:01:24I noticed two trees in the distance, and they just literally flopped to one side, both of them in the same direction.
01:01:33I realised that this was passing in front of me.
01:01:40What on earth's happening?
01:01:41What sort of damage is this thing wreaking?
01:01:43You could see, obviously, the school turret come off, the tiles coming off the church, sheets of corrugated steel and iron flying through the air.
01:01:54They're obviously going to do some damage.
01:01:58The tornado was ferocious, fast-moving, and short-lived.
01:02:02In just under five minutes, it travelled seven miles, carving a path through Kingsheath, Moseley, Balsallheath and Smallheath, before coming to a stop in Erdington.
01:02:15A study by the University of Manchester tracking tornado hotspots in the UK found three distinct regions with a higher chance of a tornado strike.
01:02:23And one of these was actually in a line west and south of Birmingham.
01:02:27And in this zone, there's a 5% chance of seeing a tornado here every year.
01:02:32The tornado spiralled in and out so quickly, no-one really had a chance to grasp what was happening.
01:02:38I was part of a specialist international search and rescue team.
01:02:42We carried pagers with us 24 hours a day.
01:02:47And I distinctly remember the pager going off.
01:02:51It said, Tornado, Birmingham, city centre.
01:02:54My immediate thought was, this can't be right.
01:02:57We don't get tornadoes in Birmingham.
01:03:02I found out it was a tornado later on, I think probably about an hour after the event, once the police had arrived.
01:03:09Suddenly I thought, well, we're on a camcorder.
01:03:11Why don't I go out and record it?
01:03:12All I could see was hundreds of people out on the streets and just walls collapsed, cars overturned, trees uprooted.
01:03:23It was a scene of complete chaos.
01:03:25It was like a bomb had hit the place.
01:03:27I've travelled extensively.
01:03:28I've seen thunderstorms in Miami, dust storms in Dubai, monsoons in Pakistan, etc.
01:03:33But nothing on this level.
01:03:34A major emergency had been declared.
01:03:37So we knew that something really serious had actually happened.
01:03:42We had to plan our search and rescue.
01:03:45We were told that it was at least a kilometre wide by 1.6 kilometres.
01:03:50And within that area, there was 30 different streets.
01:03:5540% of the buildings actually had damage to them.
01:03:59And 15 buildings had completely lost their roofs.
01:04:03So there was a huge amount of devastation in a very localised area.
01:04:07When the storm had passed, the thing that remains in my memory more than anything was I was walking down Moult Street.
01:04:14And one of the houses there had had the front of the house ripped off.
01:04:18And it looked just like a child's doll's house.
01:04:22You could see into each room.
01:04:24I've never seen anything like it before.
01:04:27Roofs had been ripped off houses.
01:04:30A lot of structural damage, a lot of trees that had been felled.
01:04:34In over 30 years, with West Midlands Fire Service, the level of damage and destruction, I'd never really seen that before in a UK event.
01:04:45If I had turned up not knowing it was a tornado, I would have expected it to have been a gas explosion.
01:04:53I can remember trees that had gone through front windows.
01:04:59I can remember cars being overturned, lots of trees on top of cars, walls collapsed.
01:05:07The Birmingham tornado was actually declared as a major emergency.
01:05:15And on that day, we had over 25 fire engines, over 100 firefighters.
01:05:22We didn't know if there's still people actually missing or trapped inside those damaged buildings.
01:05:27So that was our main task, was to search and obviously to extricate then anybody that may have been trapped inside the buildings.
01:05:35Despite the extreme intensity of the tornado, at times hitting wind speeds of 130 miles per hour, thankfully no lives were lost.
01:05:4619 people were injured, however, and the Birmingham tornado remains the costliest ever recorded in Britain, racking up a repair bill of over 40 million pounds.
01:05:56The time of the tornado was mid-afternoon, and it would have been so much different if that tornado had happened during the evening hours when people are at home, or indeed later when people are in bed.
01:06:08I would have expected a lot more injuries and potentially worse.
01:06:12When I went out walking with my wife in the evening, we had a stroll around the area to see what had happened, and tried to work out the path that the storm had taken.
01:06:22It went through my mind that this must have been what it was like in the Blitz, because Sparkbrook was quite heavily bombed.
01:06:30I just find it hard to believe that no one died in this case.
01:06:33I would describe it as something very extreme.
01:06:39It's the sort of thing that you imagine what you see on the news happening in, you know, America somewhere, or some remote part of the world.
01:06:46You would never expect something like this in this country.
01:06:48Yeah.
01:07:10Transcription by CastingWords
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