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00:00:01it started with the noise and it was out of nowhere absolutely terrifying from deadly gales
00:00:10and biblical flash floods it was like something out of apocalypse to searing temperatures and
00:00:18arctic blizzards there were cars buried there were signs buried nothing could move
00:00:26our weather has destroyed homes the front of the house was literally like blown out
00:00:32and taken lives they took me one way and they took my sister towards the morgue
00:00:41this is the story of six of the most devastating weather events mother nature has ever thrown
00:00:47of the uk railway shut the airport's shut it was just total devastation just a freak event which
00:00:56ended in horror told by those who lived through it it still has an impact on me to this day
00:01:04and those
00:01:05who battled bravely to save lives i've been to terrorist incidents and bomb blasts and it looked
00:01:10like that it was probably as scary as serving a northern islander fighting to survive britain's
00:01:17most deadly weather
00:01:31in july 2022 a dome of high pressure sat over the uk
00:01:36huge parts of the country were basking in unseasonably warm temperatures above 25 degrees
00:01:42on the 19th of july it peaked at 40.3 degrees celsius a new record uk has never reached 40
00:01:51degrees celsius
00:01:51prior to then the highest temperature we'd ever had was 38.7 degrees we didn't just break this record we
00:01:58smashed it by over one and a half degrees so the exceptionally hot weather of 2022 was associated
00:02:04with a heat dome an area of high pressure sitting across the uk many enjoyed the heat but it soon
00:02:11began to have devastating consequences it wasn't warm weather the people were enjoying this is an
00:02:18extreme weather event like a storm or a hurricane across london's boroughs temperatures had hit 20
00:02:23degrees for 20 straight days drying the air and parching the ground particularly around east london and
00:02:30essex borders it became the busiest day since world war ii for the london fire brigade
00:02:38by 20 past nine on the morning of the 19th of july it was already a sweltering 33 degrees in
00:02:45london
00:02:51i had a funeral to take i remember standing there just sweat dripping down my back even though you
00:02:58know our churches tend to remain cool um it had gone past that because it had been so warm for
00:03:03so long
00:03:04i was working in my office doing my day job very early on it was clear that on that day
00:03:11that it was going to be a very busy day for the london fire brigade there hadn't been a drop
00:03:16of rain
00:03:17in london for nearly two weeks so not only was it very hot it was very dry as well so
00:03:24these conditions
00:03:24are perfect for fires to spread at 9 34 9 9 9 calls flooded the london fire brigade that grasslands
00:03:33in
00:03:33east london were aflame there was lots of information coming over the radio underneath
00:03:39it was getting busier and busier in just two and a half hours lfb received as many 999 calls as
00:03:48they
00:03:48normally do in 24. fires were springing up all across london including elise peterson's home parish
00:03:55two miles from where she was conducting the funeral standing outside the crematorium and i could see
00:04:01smoke on the horizon but i had no idea where it was my friends here waiting for me said we've
00:04:09received
00:04:09phone call and wennington is on fire
00:04:15at six minutes past one fire crews were dispatched to wennington on the far fringes of east london
00:04:21following reports of people stuck in a burning building the initial call was to a house fire
00:04:28by the time i had arrived and i was in charge it was much more than just a house fire
00:04:34we knew it was pretty bad we got in the car and tried to come down to wennington
00:04:42just see black smoke billowing out of the village as joe reached the original source of the fire
00:04:49the air temperature was already higher than it had ever been in london 39 degrees and getting hotter
00:04:55it was 40 degrees heat there was two houses alight so we had the radiated heat from them houses
00:05:01as well as the surrounding heat from the temperatures of that day
00:05:08the prolonged heat of the past month meant wennington was in a particularly vulnerable position
00:05:14we are in the borough of havering so technically we're part of london but a lot of people in the
00:05:20village would argue that and say no we're part of essex there is a lot of grassland around us
00:05:27so there was a lot of fuel for the fire the driest july since 1935 created thirsty air which had
00:05:36sucked
00:05:37all the water from the vegetation the bone dry grass that surrounded this semi-rural part of london
00:05:43meant fires could rapidly spread it spread very very quickly to the marshland as well as all the way
00:05:49along wennington road within 40 minutes joe had requested 15 fire engines to attend more than 100
00:05:59firefighters fought the blaze as it threatened homes possessions and human life it all moved so quickly
00:06:07people you know were trying to figure out what do i pack up what do i take with me really
00:06:13lives were in
00:06:27danger
00:06:28this was properties cars outbuildings grassland marshland this was a villager light
00:06:37on the 19th of july 2022 extreme temperatures of around 40 degrees ignited parched land in the
00:06:45london borough of havering and fire had spread to a row of houses 15 fire engines and 100 fire officers
00:06:53battled to contain the inferno residents were knocking on one another's doors getting one another out of the
00:07:00village doing whatever it took people were escaping in what they had a lot of disbelief disorientation
00:07:11just not really understanding what was going on two hours after the fire started it had traveled 200
00:07:18meters through the village destroying half a dozen homes and covering nearby fields villagers had to find
00:07:24shelter wherever they could they came down and took refuge here in the church thinking it would be a safe
00:07:30place i kept finding wet tea towels and it took me a moment to realize that people had been using
00:07:35those as masks to you know get through the smoke
00:07:40i would be looking at houses and vehicles that an hour later would be completely burnt
00:07:47i joined the london fire brigade who saved people to save property to put fires out
00:07:55and on that day there were properties that we weren't going to be able to save
00:08:0112 minutes past three in the afternoon our peak temperature came 40.3 degrees celsius at coningsby in
00:08:09lincolnshire london was just 0.1 degrees behind it was now 16 degrees hotter than average
00:08:19we're trained to to respond and operate in high temperatures and extreme temperatures
00:08:25but they are generally for shorter spaces of time
00:08:30what we experienced on the 19th of july was a protracted exposure seven members of the public were
00:08:39treated for heat exhaustion it was vital joe stopped his crews from overheating
00:08:45we very quickly decided to allow people to not wear their tunics
00:08:52there were garden hoses that members of the public had left out in their front gardens
00:08:56for us to be able to cool ourselves down and to try and bring down your core body temperature
00:09:05wennington was just one of 106 fires across the capital during the record-breaking heat of the 19th
00:09:11july 26 were big enough to require at least four fire engines to fight as many as 23 injuries were
00:09:19reported the london fire brigade said it was their busiest day they'd had since the second world war
00:09:26fires also broke out in dorset hampshire and norfolk major incidents were declared by fire services in
00:09:33yorkshire and leicestershire as temperature records were smashed across the uk across the country 430
00:09:40people died from the heat scotland had their record temperatures and some places broke their records
00:09:45by over six degrees celsius but it was so hot that it was melting the tarmac on roads for the
00:09:52first time
00:09:52ever we issued a red extreme heat warning across the uk more than 800 wildfires were recorded in a single
00:10:01day after a grueling 12 and a half hours the fire in wennington was under control
00:10:0940 hectares of grassland 14 houses 12 stables five cars and six garages were completely destroyed 88
00:10:18properties were evacuated i was at that incident up till in and around midnight i was very tired
00:10:27physically tired mentally tired the wennington fires are one of them incidents that i'm probably going to
00:10:34remember for the rest of my career because you know i hope that i don't go to another incident of
00:10:43or fire
00:10:44of that scale the next day i was able to walk through the village with people
00:11:02it was just shocking and overwhelming to see
00:11:10and i'd said yeah that house is gone and walked down a little bit further that house is gone as
00:11:16well
00:11:17the summer of 2022 was the hottest in history in england it saw almost 25 000 wildfires between june and
00:11:26august four times the number of the previous year in total 2985 deaths were attributed to the heat of the
00:11:35summer of 2022. remarkably no one in wennington was killed there was a lot of relief the next day that
00:11:44there had been no loss of life and you know we gave thanks for that
00:11:50the devastation that it caused you can't help not just as a fire officer but as a human being feeling
00:11:58the impact that that is going to have on the local communities
00:12:03seeing the pictures and the overall scale of the devastation in the aftermath you can't help but look
00:12:12at that and just start to really appreciate the task that we had on that day 17 houses suffered extensive
00:12:20fire damage most destroyed completely but despite being in the center of the fire miraculously elise's
00:12:28church survived the fire burned all the way around the church but did not touch the walls of the church
00:12:37i'm glad that the church survived but how do i speak to people who've lost everything in their homes you
00:12:47know definitely has changed the village everyone even if they were able to return to their homes
00:12:52experienced some level of trauma but obviously for those who lost everything it's much more dramatic
00:13:00we never thought we would be saying 40 degrees celsius that was a climate change projection of 2050
00:13:06what was once impossible is now not only possible but becoming more likely
00:13:11and that is what is scary the summer of 2022 was eye-opening for us within the london fire brigade
00:13:20if you were to ask me that you know in 2022 you know we could arguably say it might have
00:13:25been a freak
00:13:26event i think in reality i would say no it's not a freak event it is more becoming more and
00:13:31more likely
00:13:33we are going to see more and more wildfires the devastation that that brings
00:13:39is huge 2022 was the hottest summer ever in the uk but 15 years earlier 2007 saw one of the
00:13:51wettest
00:13:51summers on record it started raining in may and barely stopped for three months
00:14:01the jet stream is a really fast ribbon of wind that moves in the upper atmosphere
00:14:07and it controls lots of the weather that we get here in the uk in summer we expect the jet
00:14:12stream
00:14:12to be quite high up towards iceland and that brings nice warm weather over the uk but in 2007 we
00:14:19were
00:14:19stuck on the wrong side of it it was sat really far south allowing a succession of low pressure systems
00:14:26to move in it didn't move we then got low pressure after low pressure storm after storm
00:14:31over 10 weeks more than 10 inches of rain fell on the west midlands two and a half times as
00:14:37much
00:14:38as usual the scene was set for deadly flooding it just kept raining which meant all of those little
00:14:45gaps in the soil just got full and there was nowhere for the water to go and everything is spilling
00:14:50onto
00:14:51the surface but more rain was forecast tally giampa was commander at gloucester fire station
00:14:59right in the crosshairs of the coming storm i received a phone call from a local reporter we
00:15:07said we hear that there's going to be three to four inches of rain coming down tomorrow
00:15:13doesn't sound much but that's about two months worth of rain
00:15:18on ground which is completely saturated we had this moist warm air coming up from france
00:15:25and it just got stuck over the uk which brought a lot of rainfall right in the firing line of
00:15:31this
00:15:31weather was worcestershire and gloucestershire it's the perfect storm isn't it the perfect scenario for
00:15:38major flooding
00:15:43there had been around 30 centimeters of rain over evesham since may the river avon was nearly five
00:15:50meters higher than usual this picturesque town of evesham in worcestershire has effectively been
00:15:55cut off from its neighbors it had broken its banks and was pouring into villages and homes
00:16:01my first call out of the day to an actual rescue
00:16:07was an elderly couple both stuck in their house wheelchair bound
00:16:11we just saw just a massive wall of water all the way down the road
00:16:16you couldn't have walked down there you couldn't took a fire engine down there the water was flowing
00:16:21just too fast so gone to the boat then went down to the house carried the two people out as
00:16:30we're
00:16:30about to pull away remember an nova voxel nova lifting up off the floor it's really scary this water
00:16:37if you go into it that's it hereford and worcester fire and rescue received more than 2 000
00:16:44emergency calls in 27 hours around 20 percent of its annual average the radio on the fire engine was
00:16:52continually going fire control was just fielding calls just didn't stop
00:17:05vania atkins was at home in sedgeburgh right in the center of the deluge the devastating effect of
00:17:11the rain was rapidly becoming clear i was 34 weeks pregnant at the time
00:17:18i could see it was raining and and then you could see surface water in the road
00:17:24then it was getting a bit more and you're thinking okay i could see neighbors getting sandbags out
00:17:31i'm thinking okay this is quite serious now the rain kept coming on a biblical scale
00:17:37more than a centimeter of rain fell every hour for six straight hours it was a one in a thousand
00:17:44year
00:17:45deluge roads were almost impassable at that stage we are talking about roads that shouldn't flood
00:17:54dual carriageways trunk roads motorways on the 20th of july rain stations across the region smashed rainfall
00:18:01records one recorded a staggering 147 millimeters or nearly six inches of rain in a single day as much
00:18:09as it normally received in more than two months we had train lines blocked we had water everywhere across
00:18:16the fields across people's homes of course and the rivers just didn't go down
00:18:23i went into the utility room and thinking oh it's a bit spongy and before i know it water was
00:18:30coming
00:18:30through the floor i think within about two minutes it was actually coming in the front of the house
00:18:37vania grabbed whatever precious items she could and rushed her 19-month-old son and some food upstairs
00:18:43it was just in time as flood waters barreled towards her house it was like a wave of water coming
00:18:50down the main road
00:18:54before you know it i think my downstairs was about five six foot underwater
00:19:01and i'm thinking god 34 weeks pregnant you know what do you do and there's no way out now
00:19:12steve rushed to sedgeboro as the scale of the disaster became clear the radio message come to us
00:19:20multiple risk to life in the sedgeboro area multiple rescues required the scene that greeted him was
00:19:25like something from a hollywood disaster movie i've not seen anything like it ever
00:19:32the main road was gone it was just water from building to building
00:19:40there was no gardens you couldn't see cars you couldn't see any of the road furniture
00:19:4630 mile an hour signs stop signs they were all gone
00:19:50i just remember a white van being in the middle of the road and the driver got out and tried
00:19:57to
00:19:58get onto the roof and this van was bobbing around like a toy car
00:20:03the water was literally just underneath the ledge of people's bedroom windows
00:20:11so you're looking at eight or nine foot we went over a stop sign i believe it was in our
00:20:15boat caught
00:20:16it with the engine we could feel it scraping over the top of cars as well
00:20:20i heard all the helicopters overhead and sirens you could hear all these sirens going off i just
00:20:28remember my heart beating really quickly and thinking you know you think you're calm but you're
00:20:33not actually calm so your heart's going it's racing
00:20:38what's that they're thinking oh god what if i go into labor now her being heavily pregnant
00:20:42was a massive priority wouldn't rescue but two lives isn't it i think they thought you know they
00:20:49need to get me out
00:20:55so
00:21:04on the 20th of july 2007 more than two months of rain fell on the west midlands in a single
00:21:10day
00:21:1134 week pregnant vanya atkins was trapped in her house by nine feet of flood water
00:21:17emergency workers were desperate to evacuate her she was in the front bedroom window on the second
00:21:22floor and the water was just under her bedroom window raf were there it's raining it's really
00:21:31cold it's getting quite dark i didn't see the helicopter above me i could hear them but i couldn't
00:21:38actually see them she'd lifted herself up into the windowsill the boat was there before and then
00:21:45the helicopter was above then my little boy start crying and he was starting to get scared and you
00:21:52know mummy mummy mummy and she was sort of half out within a minute or so of us getting there
00:22:00a
00:22:01winchman came down this man put this harness around me and i thought oh it's because he's going to get
00:22:07me
00:22:07into the boat the next i remember is i was about 100 150 feet up in the air
00:22:16i'm stood on the roof looking at a helicopter winching someone away
00:22:22yeah something you don't see every day
00:22:27and it was when they got me in the helicopter you're literally in a daze
00:22:34at this point your heart's going so fast it's literally and you can't take a breath
00:22:41vanya was one of more than 60 people airlifted from the local area nearly 90 homes were evacuated
00:22:51with vanya on her way to hospital fire crews quickly turned their attention to others in
00:22:56immediate risk of losing their lives it was massively intense it was instant to instant to incident
00:23:07i came in at eight o'clock in the morning i went home at half nine the following day
00:23:13we came into station once during the night to change into dry clothes a couple of cups of coffee
00:23:20and off we went again through the 24-hour period our boat on its own we rescued 20 people plus
00:23:31they took us to the hospital and dropped us off and it was yeah like nothing i've ever seen
00:23:40the helicopter landed in the car park of the hospital that sprayed water around everywhere
00:23:45got into the hospital and it was like chaos
00:23:52then all these other people not knowing what was happening drenched from the rain they were just
00:23:57trying to allocate people it was literally like something out of apocalypse
00:24:10as the day progressed attention turned to the medieval town of tewkesbury
00:24:15situated where the river seven and avon meet tewkesbury became the the place of greatest danger
00:24:21by the friday evening
00:24:25you've got two big rivers meeting there
00:24:30when we have two rivers meeting you kind of get this double surge of water coming together
00:24:36and spilling out onto the floodplain what we're dealing with is high flowing water so torrents of
00:24:44water passing through tewkesbury where where the river has burst its banks powerful currents
00:24:53that would simply sweep people away the devastating torrents of water in tewkesbury claimed the life
00:24:59of mitchell taylor caught in flood water as he returned home that evening
00:25:04we put together a search operation the use of hovercrafts within 10 minutes they
00:25:11radioed a message back to me to say that they'd found
00:25:15someone three people died in gloucestershire and one in worcestershire as a result of the floods in
00:25:212007. thousands were out of their homes for up to two years when i got back to the house it
00:25:27was a couple of days later
00:25:28it was really shocking
00:25:32upturned cars in the street toys being swept away
00:25:40literally it looked like a war zone
00:25:46the earliest someone got back into the house was i think about six to eight months
00:25:50i was out two years all these houses were ruined absolutely ruined huge huge amounts of damage
00:26:02it's unlivable you can't live in a house that's been flooded like that
00:26:11across the country over 60 000 homes and businesses were affected by flooding in the summer of 2007.
00:26:187 000 people were rescued it was on a scale that we'd never seen before nowhere was unscathed many
00:26:27people lost their property and 13 people died it was truly awful more would have lost their lives if
00:26:36not for the efforts of the emergency services we were very challenged to be honest however we did
00:26:42i think saved 20 people's lives we're proud of the part we played as emergency services
00:26:51but we don't want to ever experience that ever again i'd served in the military before and i'd done
00:26:56tours in northern ireland in belfast it was probably as scary as serving in northern ireland yeah i hope it
00:27:02was a freak event i hope it was a a one-off i hope that you know i never have
00:27:07to witness that again
00:27:10vanya's baby daughter was born healthy a few weeks later this is probably the most dramatic thing
00:27:16that's ever happened to me but i also feel very lucky that i came out of it unscathed you know
00:27:25my
00:27:25daughter was born perfectly healthy the material stuff we replaced it's something i'm not i don't
00:27:31i'm ever going to forget 2007 saw devastation come from the sky but just over 50 years earlier it came
00:27:42from the sea in january 1953 a wall of water whipped up by 100 mile per hour winds left a
00:27:51trail of death
00:27:52and destruction as it surged across the east coast of the uk 400 people were still reported missing on
00:27:58campbell it killed 307 people one of the deadliest natural disasters on record
00:28:16i was living with my mum my dad and my little sister judith judith and i spent most of our
00:28:23time
00:28:23outside playing anyway well we were always together we got on very well
00:28:32she was my best friend and um she was a lovely little thing full of fun
00:28:39and made everybody laugh edna had recently moved to canvey island in essex
00:28:45a popular location for families moving from london after the second world war
00:28:51it was just a little four bedroom shack
00:28:57so the one half had a little sitting room and a kitchen and the other half had two little bedrooms
00:29:06the sea wall would have been about a hundred yards away
00:29:09for edna and her family saturday the 31st of january was a normal evening
00:29:15we'd had our bath we were sitting on the floor in our 90s and dad was playing the banjo he
00:29:22started to
00:29:23cut up newspaper and he made little string people out of it when he said you've got to go to
00:29:30bed we
00:29:31said oh can we do it again tomorrow dad please shortly after midnight the family was awoken by a crash
00:29:38mom was sleeping and as the water came in the chest of drawers was sort of beginning to float
00:29:47and the lamp fell off and bashed on the bottom of the bed and she came running in and we
00:29:53were our
00:29:53mattress was just sliding into the sea nine-year-old rod bishop heard the storm hit from the other side
00:30:00of
00:30:00the island it's about two o'clock in the morning um my dad's brother run down the road knocking
00:30:06everybody up because he'd been informed by the uh firemen who lived opposite him that the ball sea
00:30:11water broken as i came out of our gate all i could hear was people's screams coming from the other
00:30:18side
00:30:19of the island can the island was the final destination for a storm that had ravaged the entire eastern
00:30:26seaboard of britain low pressure system developed over scotland it moved around an arc across the
00:30:33north down the east coast as the center of the system deepened the pressure got lower and lower
00:30:39and the winds just got stronger and stronger we measure low pressure systems depressions in something
00:30:46called millibars this one was particularly low 964 and that means that the level of the sea gets sucked up
00:30:55a little bit like you're sucking a straw when the pressure drops this low it can cause the sea to
00:31:01rise you know about half a meter up wind will also pile water up against the coast raising the sea
00:31:08level
00:31:08even further these strong winds cause basically like a bulge of water to move down and down and down to
00:31:15cause a huge storm surge right down the east coast of england the surge came at the worst possible time
00:31:22it coincided not just with a high tide but the highest tide of the month a spring tide is when
00:31:29we
00:31:30have the earth the moon and the sun all in a line and that means that gravity is pulling that
00:31:35water onto
00:31:36the shore so on top of that normal tide you've got a lot more water than normal when high tide
00:31:43struck it
00:31:44was a full two meters higher than usual the area impacted was huge 160 000 acres all the way from
00:31:52yorkshire right the way down to the thames estuary when it hit canvey island it was more than sea
00:31:58defenses could take canvey island dates back to the 17th century and it was created by the dutch
00:32:04much of it is below sea level even now so the dutch built a lot of big sea walls to
00:32:10try and protect it
00:32:11from the raging tides these sea walls were actually generally built of mud but the problem is if
00:32:18particularly high tide that breaches them it can wash away the wall from the other side
00:32:23washed over the top of the wall and it just collapsed
00:32:29the sea wall broke couldn't take this heavy really heavy tide well it's like a tsunami
00:32:39the devastating sea surge came in the early hours of the morning when everyone was asleep in bed
00:32:45it all happened so quickly that no one could warn us that we should try and even get out to
00:32:52go to
00:32:53somebody else's house people in canvey island were not warned about the storm telephone lines in
00:33:01lincolnshire and norfolk had been knocked down warnings were not passed to the counties further south
00:33:06until it was too late half asleep and with no time to prepare edna and her family were faced with
00:33:14a
00:33:14terrifying wall of freezing sea water rushing into the house her father had to act fast to save his young
00:33:20family from drowning it was a little window and my dad smashed that and he went out backwards like this
00:33:30and over the top of that pulled himself over the top of the roof and then he climbed onto the
00:33:37corrugated
00:33:37iron roof and somehow or other i don't know he must have got tremendous strength that night but he
00:33:43smashed the corrugated iron in with his bare hands and that made a shoot down to where we were so
00:33:54that
00:33:54we could climb up and get on the roof by the time we got there the sea was on the
00:34:02gutters it was a good
00:34:04eight nine feet high the situation was made worse by the very sea defenses designed to save them
00:34:13we were in the newlands part of the island which was worst hit than any other part of the island
00:34:20canvey had these what they called party sea walls case an area one area sea wall broke it wouldn't
00:34:27affect the rest of it the sea breached the first wall and then didn't reach the second wall so it
00:34:33just
00:34:34stayed there in a sea wall kept the water where it was that is unfortunately what caused a lot of
00:34:41the
00:34:41people to be really flooded badly there was water all around us just swirling it was really winter cold
00:34:52freezing cold high wind you couldn't see anything except the water with blankets and clothes sodden
00:35:00the freezing night provided just as much danger as the water judith and i were in our 90s dad was
00:35:09in
00:35:09these underpants and mum was in a little cotton dressing gown and we sat on the roof cuddling up
00:35:17together to keep warm that's where we spent the night temperatures were well below average hovering
00:35:24around zero degrees coldest night of the year they said my sister lost consciousness quite soon
00:35:32and i don't think mum was too long after her dad was trying to fight to come back and he
00:35:41said keep
00:35:42shouting for help ed and he said shout shout and i kept sitting up and shouting help help help he
00:35:49said keep
00:35:50it up head that's bringing me back he could hear me it seemed to go on forever
00:36:01when the daylight came we could see the enormity of what had happened
00:36:07the water was all around us just swirling and swirling we could see where the sea wall had broken
00:36:14and we saw it go again we saw a man on the other side of the field dive into the
00:36:25sea and go try and
00:36:26swim for it we don't think he survived it was so cold the bungalows on canvey especially the newlands area
00:36:35a lot of those were sort of prefabricated type bungalows some of them were washed off of their
00:36:41foundations and it was just a total devastation can't go down the foundations can't go low into
00:36:50the ground because the water table is very high so essentially the cement bases are pretty much
00:36:54sitting on top of the ground and that makes them particularly vulnerable
00:37:01we saw a house like ours come off its concrete base
00:37:06and just move in the water and it was coming right to us and i can remember dad saying we're
00:37:15done for
00:37:16now there was a submerged tree and as the house floated by it hit that tree under the water
00:37:28and it came by us in about six foot away it was really unbelievable that it missed us
00:37:36dad was convinced it would hit us and then we would have been done for
00:37:43eventually somebody came in dinghies to get us off with so many people underwater getting rescue
00:37:51boats to everyone was an almost impossible task we spent 13 hours up there
00:37:59mum and dad and my sister were all unconscious by this time from the cold and two lovely men
00:38:07i suppose they were ambulance men piggybacked us all along the sea wall judith and i were put in that
00:38:15ambulance we were just both taken off to south end general hospital and when we got there they took
00:38:24me one way and they took my sister judith the other way which was apparently towards the morgue
00:38:3558 people lost their lives
00:38:40mainly from the area on the north side of the island one boy the boy at school that i knew
00:38:48had perished as well my parents had a greengrocer's shop in high street and
00:38:53my dad was identifying a lot of the people that were drowned or died from hypothermia
00:39:01must have been absolutely horrendous
00:39:06this is a huge death toll as a consequence of the floods
00:39:10the isle of death they call canvy 307 people died across the uk this is the biggest natural
00:39:17disaster in the country for the entire 20th century and one of the biggest in the uk throughout all
00:39:23history it was devastating mum was never the same
00:39:33she'd lost a child and i didn't really have much of a childhood after that
00:39:40i did but it wasn't the same
00:39:49it was survivor's guilt i think
00:40:10the north sea flood was britain's deadliest weather event of the 20th century
00:40:16but in 1990 one of the most intense storms in history hit huge swathes of the uk smack on casualties
00:40:23and chaos were still being discovered many victims to little chance it took more lives than any other
00:40:30onshore storm for at least 100 years he was larger than life character
00:40:38very sociable very well thought of
00:40:42he was a very involved dad
00:40:45he would get up very early in the mornings and take me to the swimming training
00:40:50he was just there for everything that we did he was always there
00:41:01fairham in hampshire saw record wind gusts of 80 miles per hour
00:41:05just as police inspector john smith set off to work
00:41:11this storm was actually really well forecast we had some good information coming from ships in the
00:41:17atlantic who released weather balloons up to take in information about the air pressure as this storm
00:41:24developed it became really very low pressure indeed 949 millibars that's extremely low and the center of
00:41:33that system gets lower and lower in pressure the winds get very very strong this weather system became
00:41:40really very devastating it was a weather bomb
00:41:45and my dad was john smith he was chief inspector at police headquarters in winchester i was working as a
00:41:53riding instructor at hms stride it was a really windy day so on the morning he'd left work before me
00:42:00he'd
00:42:01made comment that he was going to see if the trees were still standing the way he went to work
00:42:05and we
00:42:06just went off to work as you would normally
00:42:17as we went across to the main part of dryad it was really hard to walk across the courtyard
00:42:23it wasn't till later that morning that i was asked to go across to the lieutenant commander's office
00:42:30and a friend of the family who was on duty that day came to tell me
00:42:42they came in and just just said that you know john's been killed
00:42:48and i obviously asked what had happened and um
00:42:55he just said that tree had fallen on his car
00:43:00there was a witness that said that the speed at which the tree came down was just phenomenal
00:43:06and i just remember the sheer shock and disbelief that it had happened
00:43:15yeah i mean i think about it all the time i i you know if i'm driving around and it's
00:43:19windy it's
00:43:19always there
00:43:24that fear that that could happen again
00:43:30the winds continued to build gusts up to 107 miles per hour swept eastwards from the atlantic hitting
00:43:38highly populated areas in england and wales head on in the heart of the day everybody was out going to
00:43:47work and school half a million homes without power three million trees were down roads were impacted there
00:43:55were overturned vehicles and trees blocking them railways shut the airports shut ports shut wiltshire saw
00:44:03average hourly wind speeds of 47 miles per hour many schools across the county were still in session
00:44:19i joined grange infants uh in 89 i was 10 years old literally still trying to settle in make friends
00:44:29that week
00:44:30it was cursed because without two firearms went off you know you just knew something was going to happen
00:44:35you're always waiting for that third event to take place listening to the wind in the classroom it was
00:44:42rattling the windows it was really only the sound that made you think there was anything wrong
00:44:49and then it all changed
00:44:55just after one o'clock about quarter past one i noticed something blowing off the roof
00:45:02when i heard the noise from along the corridors i didn't know what had happened
00:45:09i knew it had been something bad quite how bad it was i didn't know
00:45:17we'd had a teaching assistant that day and we were talking about the weather and she was just going
00:45:24through the um the gale force wind scale you were perhaps around six or seven you know by her description
00:45:31and she just explained the gale force 10 and the roof just peeled off like a tin of sardines
00:45:42it started with the noise and it was out of nowhere absolutely terrifying the roof just picked up and
00:45:50the wind disappeared the only way i can describe it is the sound of a building being torn in two
00:46:02you just heard this almighty bang and then just just the wind really the wind just overtook everything
00:46:11the the howling was right above you and it was quite overwhelming
00:46:17all hell broke loose it felt like being inside a vortex of pain and chaos
00:46:24there was wind everywhere fiberglass from the ceiling being whipped around like you were in a yellow snow
00:46:29storm it was hitting you in the face
00:46:35children were screaming teachers were screaming it was absolute bedlam and we could hear like just
00:46:42shouting someone get under the tables get under the tables i could see pupils under tables um screaming
00:46:49and crying and not knowing what to do i went back to to try and get them and i'm i've
00:46:56been told i got
00:46:56several people out from under the tables and back down the stairs because they were too afraid to move
00:47:04as we exited the classroom it was just the look of horror and shock on people's faces this was so
00:47:12far
00:47:12out of the ordinary that your mind almost couldn't find anything to grasp onto we all needed to get
00:47:18downstairs as quickly as possible as we came out to the landing area i could look across and i could
00:47:24see
00:47:26the other classroom on the end you could see people coming out just covered in rubble
00:47:33the gable end had collapsed
00:47:37as i approached the doors i could see wreckage the classroom just looked at a wreck
00:47:47the first thing i was aware of when i went in
00:47:50the sky and then i saw roof had fallen down and a big pile i remember looking up and seeing
00:47:57the
00:47:58blackboard had gone but there were framed pictures bizarrely still still on the wall and it was little
00:48:04elements like that that just stuck in my mind out of all of this whirlpool of of madness
00:48:11so i was the last person from our class into the into the hall and just walking into
00:48:18what felt like a scene from a war movie
00:48:23children crying adults crying people just not knowing what to do sat quietly or screaming in a
00:48:31corner it was absolute chaos just had to get our heads down and get out the classroom as soon as
00:48:37we
00:48:37can how did everybody react we were all scared at 10 years old all sorts of things run through your
00:48:45mind
00:48:46you don't know what's going to happen next are you safe the teachers and the students were obviously
00:48:52very concerned frightened even teachers were that day were absolutely amazing they must have been
00:48:58going through a traumatic experience as well something they don't expect to happen my deputy head
00:49:03who ran the class where the roof came off kept the children very much you know and was really trying
00:49:10to calm them
00:49:12the majority of injuries seem to be uh related to the fiberglass that was strewn everywhere i had to go
00:49:19to hospital i had swallowed some and i had throat damage
00:49:23people had it in their eyes the injured um children were taken care of
00:49:28and then taken away by ambulance to the hospital for medical attention however one girl did lose her life
00:49:34emily mcdonald sadly a friend of ours emily lost her life in the accident
00:49:45arguably the burns day storm saw the most severe gales of the 20th century both for its geographical extent
00:49:52and its intensity combined the death toll of 47 people backs that up
00:50:01it still has an impact on me to this day i don't think it's something that ever leaves you
00:50:07this was above all the tragedy
00:50:10it's not an easy thing to forget it's not an easy thing to to put behind you
00:50:16something like that impacts your life greatly the only people that understand it are those that
00:50:22have experienced it it was a complete tragedy it was just a freak event which ended in horror
00:50:34it certainly wouldn't be shown to anybody else
00:50:57i woke up that morning and said to george the new baby was about to be born
00:51:03i need to get to hospital we pulled the blinds and oh there was snow everywhere
00:51:11in 1982 a devastating winter saw the mercury in the uk dip to its lowest ever point
00:51:19at least 1 000 people died of hypothermia the extraordinary low temperatures accompanied snow
00:51:26that wreaked havoc on communities across the uk we had this area of low pressure coming across the
00:51:32atlantic and it brought a huge amount of snow on the 7th of january it started to snow on an
00:51:40epic scale
00:51:41in what became known as the big snow
00:51:53i remember going to bed and it was snowing heavy i would say it was about two to three foot
00:52:01of snow
00:52:03it just kept mounting up mounting up and mounting up it was torrential snow
00:52:10the snow fell for 36 hours straight up to a meter settled in parts of wales by the time
00:52:17it stopped villages like bedlinog were almost completely snowed under
00:52:25when we woke up in the morning it was covered
00:52:40it was cold we're talking minus two to minus four degrees celsius and the air was pretty dry so
00:52:46actually it was very powdery snow so we had huge amounts of wind pushing all of the snow making
00:52:52massive snow drifts it was good 12 to 14 foot of snow outside my house my father come up and
00:53:05he dug us
00:53:05out the snow cut off entire villages and ambulances and emergency services were unable to get to those in
00:53:15need there were cars buried there were signs buried nothing could move
00:53:23for anyone needing hospital it was a matter of life or death
00:53:38the worst blizzard to hit northern ireland in generations
00:53:42couldn't have come at a worse time for noreen dinsmore i woke up that morning and i well
00:53:48it's hard to explain and you just know that your baby's on the move
00:53:53going into labor noreen desperately needed to get to hospital
00:53:57it was soon clear the chances of an ambulance arriving to help were vanishingly small we pulled
00:54:03the blinds and oh there was snow everywhere couldn't see anything it was just all snow i've never seen
00:54:10snow like it it was right up to my knees i can remember walking through it and it was like
00:54:18very deep noreen's husband george had called the emergency services but the 12-foot drifts of snow
00:54:26meant getting to the house was impossible and the ambulance was forced to wait for noreen in a car park
00:54:31a
00:54:38mile away
00:54:39i knew if i got as far as the village and maybe there'd be somebody on the road
00:54:46i didn't have a plan to be honest my brother he was a farmer and he had a tractor
00:54:55i thought he was going to leave me up to the village to meet the ambulance but all of a
00:55:01sudden
00:55:01the road was blocked no tractor no cars nothing could walk it
00:55:09i said okay i'm getting off i'm walking
00:55:14deep in labor noreen battled through sub-zero temperatures knowing the baby could come at any
00:55:21moment we walked and we didn't talk much we just walked and we got to car park and
00:55:29there was the ambulance waiting for me
00:55:33i got to hospital and i can remember the nurse said to me
00:55:37noreen we need to get this baby born i said and we retired
00:55:44next thing then i don't know what happened to put next thing i had a baby girl
00:55:50beautiful baby girl
00:55:54i'm margaret doyle i'm 43 years of age and in 1982 i was born in what became known as the
00:56:01big snow
00:56:03it's terrifying for any mother to go into labor and obviously given the circumstances of the snow
00:56:09and the worry that you're actually not physically possibly going to even see a medic i can only imagine
00:56:15how scary that must have been for mom she was overcome with just relief that hopefully things
00:56:23were going to work out okay mom got to hospital just in time when i was born thankfully it was
00:56:29a
00:56:29happy ending when i think about it now and thinking about the story now i'm saying how did i do
00:56:36it how did
00:56:37i do it for many years we used to get stopped by the local people in the village and they
00:56:43would
00:56:43always ask mom which one of these is the snow baby the day after marguerite was born temperatures
00:56:50plummeted even further more places across the uk than any time in history saw a mind-numbing minus
00:56:5720 degrees recorded what happened on the 9th and 10th of january of 1982 was down to this thing called
00:57:04a polar vortex so above the north pole there's very very very cold air that swirls round and round
00:57:09the polar vortex collapsed and it became penetrated much further south a vast train of arctic hair
00:57:16heading straight for us which is why we got these record-breaking sub-zero temperatures
00:57:20on the 10th of january england saw its lowest ever temperature minus 26.1 degrees in scotland
00:57:29the record of minus 27.2 that had stood for 86 years was equaled we had no water our upstairs
00:57:39toilet froze
00:57:42my grandfather we'd try in the defrost pipes with a little blowtorch but it was so cold
00:57:49it wasn't doing any good i remember running back and forth quite a bit for snow to make cups of
00:57:58tea
00:57:58and keep warm with temperatures colder than those at the south pole the snow wasn't going anywhere
00:58:06even major cities like cardiff and swansea were cut off not only from emergency help but essential supplies
00:58:15they had to queue for bread milk and nothing could get into the village and they were only allowed
00:58:21one loaf and one pint of milk at that time
00:58:26for many people the big snow of 1982 was devastating with these sub-zero temperatures and the widespread
00:58:34snowfall it was thought that in excess of a thousand people lost their lives to hypothermia
00:58:40i don't think we ever see our storm again
00:59:06i literally finished my morning meetings was about to take a break
00:59:12and the day was just normal it was slightly cloudy um there was no real wind
00:59:20i noticed that i thought it was raining but it wasn't i was trying to comprehend what was going on
00:59:27when it touched down i knew what it was
00:59:33we don't normally see tornadoes in northland right
00:59:43at around 10 45 a.m on december 7 2006 a squall of thunder clouds accelerated eastwards towards
00:59:51london bringing rain hail and lightning to one of the uk's most populated areas
00:59:57it was now a violently rotating 2.4 kilometer wide vortex of 150 mile per hour winds
01:00:04i was on duty in wembley the weather on that day was a normal sort of wintry day
01:00:12i was working from home just going around doing my daily work working in meetings sending emails
01:00:22it was about 11 o'clock the sky suddenly went jet black
01:00:28the wind rose there was almost like a static electricity buzz in the air
01:00:34thunder and lightning terrific hail storm i can remember thinking you know we're in for a real downpour
01:00:43a few minutes later my pager sounded i could hear the pitter patter of what i thought was rain on
01:00:51the window
01:00:51as i looked up at the window i noticed that there were no beads of water because i was thinking
01:00:57like
01:00:57it's not getting wet
01:01:01and in fact what was hitting the window looked like grit or dirt or sand
01:01:07um that was touching i think that was the first sign that something was actually
01:01:12not usual but it wasn't long until things really did start to change
01:01:20there was no indication of how large this incident was i had no idea what conditions i was going to
01:01:28be
01:01:28going into the sky itself as i looked up just turned really really nearly black
01:01:38really seemed to just lower itself as if it was coming right down and as this was happening you
01:01:44could hear this this roaring sound i actually honestly thought there was a plane going to crash
01:01:52you could see this cloud just drop to the ground in a massive funnel which was about maybe 20 or
01:01:5730
01:01:58meters wide it was really fat
01:02:02a tornado is finally rotating column of air first off the rotation starts horizontally and then slowly
01:02:10but surely with the wind shear it goes vertically usually from a cloud you'll start to see this
01:02:15little funnel cloud coming out of the bottom but when that cloud touches the ground at that moment
01:02:20that is when it becomes a tornado
01:02:24seconds before 11 o'clock the swirling thunderclouds traveling over london turned into a tornado
01:02:32all hell just broke loose and that's when everything started flying
01:02:38large pieces of brick cement
01:02:45wood lead started hitting the house
01:02:50my windows got broken you could hear things crashing onto the roof of the house
01:02:57and in front of me the houses there glass exploding out of them
01:03:03the roar was so intense i took cover it it was truly you know shocking it did make you fear
01:03:11for
01:03:11your life because it was so close
01:03:15it was then pretty eerily quiet tornadoes are actually not that unusual we tend to see about
01:03:2230 in any given year we don't often think about the uk having tornadoes it's something we often
01:03:28associate with southeast asia or america with the tornado alley but actually per square meter of earth
01:03:36in the world the uk has more tornadoes than anyone else where this one hit was the problem it was
01:03:42highly residential the tornado tore a 2.7 kilometer wide trail of destruction through kencil rise
01:03:50walking from the control units to where the the scene of devastation i can only describe it as
01:03:57as well as it was it was like walking through some sort of time portal in a sci-fi film
01:04:02on one side everything was fairly normal apart from the mountains of litter
01:04:07and then all of a sudden there was just devastation
01:04:14you could see from my balcony big brick chimneys were missing had just been ripped off
01:04:22i've been to terrorist incidents and bomb blasts and it looked like that it looked as though
01:04:29a bomb had gone off
01:04:32when our crews arrived they were faced with a number of seriously damaged properties
01:04:39our fire crews have searched over a hundred properties and have found that several people
01:04:45were injured and had been treated on scene by the london ambulance service
01:04:49the tornado ripped through six streets across kencil rise leaving devastation in its wake
01:04:56it took off chimneys it fell trees and it ripped off the ends of multiple buildings in its path
01:05:03this was a scene of absolute devastation there would be a building with no glass in in the house at
01:05:10all
01:05:10roof removed gable end wall blown down one of my neighbors fiona's uh the front of the house was
01:05:18literally like blown out
01:05:23there was a van parked in the middle of the road and every piece of glass in the van was
01:05:28broken
01:05:28and the chap was still sitting in there
01:05:32and he was just as white as a sheet shaking the look on his face i'll never forget
01:05:38miraculously no one died in kensal rise but the power of the tornado did cause real harm
01:05:45there were six people injured and five with minor injuries and one person
01:05:49with fairly severe head injuries could have been far far worse
01:05:58i think for a lot of people it was quite a sad day because many of them wouldn't be able
01:06:04to come
01:06:04back into their properties for several months even years in some cases it's not habitable
01:06:12so they will be i wouldn't have thought they'll be able to go in there until the roof is repaired
01:06:16so
01:06:16a good few months the roof's mostly blown off so we need to secure it so there's no water damage
01:06:22no i think it will stick in my mind forever right and i won't forget the images in my mind
01:06:27about the
01:06:27actual sort of size and scale of it and the power it had not something you could easily forget i
01:06:34think
01:06:34it just went really dark me and my friend had to hold on to the railing it was that windy
01:06:39and
01:06:39it just went completely black and then just big dust storms flying around everywhere to see that
01:06:43amount of devastation with no apparent cause was something that i don't think anybody can be trained
01:06:51for it's certainly something that will remain with me forever
01:07:21you
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