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00:00:01it started with the noise and it was out of nowhere absolutely terrifying from deadly gales
00:00:11and 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 our weather
00:00:27has destroyed homes the front of her house was literally like blown out and taken lives they
00:00:35took me one way and they took my sister towards the morgue this is the story of six of the
00:00:44most
00:00:44devastating weather events mother nature has ever thrown at the uk railway shut the airport's shut
00:00:50it was just total devastation just a freak event which ended in horror told by those who lived
00:01:01through it it still has an impact on me to this day and those who battled bravely to save lives
00:01:07i've been to terrorist incidents bomb blasts and it looked like that it was probably as scary as
00:01:13saved in northern islander fighting to survive britain's most deadly weather
00:01:30in july 2022 a dome of high pressure sat over the uk huge parts of the country were basking in
00:01:39unseasonably warm temperatures above 25 degrees on the 19th of july it peaked at 40.3 degrees celsius
00:01:47a new record uk has never reached 40 degrees celsius prior to then the highest temperature would ever had
00:01:54was 38.7 degrees we didn't just break this record we smashed it by over one and a half degrees
00:02:01so the exceptionally hot weather of 2022 was associated with a heat dome an area of high pressure
00:02:07sitting across the uk many enjoyed the heat but it soon began to have devastating consequences
00:02:14it wasn't warm weather the people were enjoying this is an extreme weather event like a storm or a
00:02:20hurricane across london's boroughs temperatures had hit 20 degrees for 20 straight days drying the air
00:02:27and parching the ground particularly around east london in the essex borders it became the busiest day
00:02:33since world war ii for the london fire brigade by 20 past nine on the morning of the 19th of
00:02:41july
00:02:42it was already a sweltering 33 degrees in london
00:02:51i had a funeral to take i remember standing there just sweat dripping down my back even though you know
00:02:58our churches tend to remain cool um it had gone past that because it had been so warm for so
00:03:04long
00:03:05i was working in my office doing my day job very early on it was clear that on that day
00:03:10uh that it was going to be a very busy day for the london fire brigade
00:03:15there hadn't been a drop of rain in london for nearly two weeks
00:03:19so not only was it very hot it was very dry as well so these conditions are perfect for fires
00:03:26to
00:03:26spread at 9 34 9 9 9 calls flooded the london fire brigade that grasslands in east london were aflame
00:03:35there was lots of information coming over the radio
00:03:38it was getting busier and busier
00:03:43in just two and a half hours lfb received as many 9 9 9 calls as they normally do in
00:03:4924
00:03:51fires were springing up all across london including elise peterson's home parish
00:03:55two miles from where she was conducting the funeral
00:03:59standing outside the crematorium and i could see smoke on the horizon but i had no idea where it was
00:04:06my friends here waiting for me said we've received a phone 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
00:05:15we 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
00:05:23there is a lot of grassland around us so there was a lot of fuel for the fire the driest
00:05:32july
00:05:32since 1935 created thirsty air which had sucked all the water from the vegetation the bone-dry
00:05:40grass that surrounded the semi-rural part of london meant fires could rapidly spread it spread very
00:05:47very quickly to the marshland as well as all the way along wennington road within 40 minutes joe had
00:05:54requested 15 fire engines to attend more than 100 firefighters fought the blaze as it threatened homes
00:06:02possessions and human life it all moved so quickly people you know were trying to figure out what do i
00:06:11pack up what do i take with me really lives were in danger
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 have been using
00:07:35those as masks to you know get through the smoke i would be looking at houses and vehicles that an
00:07:44hour
00:07:45later would be completely burnt i joined the london fire brigade to save people to save property to put fires
00:07:52out
00:07:55and on that day there were properties that we weren't going to be able to save
00:08:01at 12 minutes past three in the afternoon our peak temperature came 40.3 degrees celsius at
00:08:08collingsby in lincolnshire london was just 0.1 degrees behind it was now 16 degrees hotter than average
00:08:18we're trained to to respond and operate in higher temperatures and extreme temperatures
00:08:25but they are generally for shorter spaces of time what we experienced on the 19th of july was a protracted
00:08:36exposure seven members of the public were treated for heat exhaustion it was vital joe stopped his
00:08:43crews from overheating we very quickly uh 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 of july
00:09:1226 were big enough to require at least four fire engines to fight as many as 23 injuries were reported
00:09:20the london fire brigade said it was their busiest day they'd had since the second world war fires also
00:09:26broke out in dorset hampshire and norfolk major incidents were declared by fire services in yorkshire
00:09:34and leicestershire as temperature records were smashed across the uk across the country 430 people died from
00:09:41the heat scotland had their record temperatures and some places broke their records by over six
00:09:46degrees celsius but it was so hot that it was melting the tarmac on roads for the first time ever
00:09:53we issued
00:09:54a red extreme heat warning across the uk more than 800 wildfires were recorded in a single day
00:10:02after a grueling 12 and a half hours the fire in wennington was under control 40 hectares of grassland
00:10:1114 houses 12 stables five cars and six garages were completely destroyed 88 properties were evacuated
00:10:20i was at that instant up till in and around midnight
00:10:25i was very tired physically tired mentally tired the wennington fires are one of them incidents that
00:10:33i'm probably going to remember for the rest of my career
00:10:39because you know i hope that i don't go to another incident of or fire of that scale
00:10:58the next day i was able to walk through the village with people it was just shocking and overwhelming
00:11:05to 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
00:11:35the summer of 2022 remarkably no one in wennington was killed there was a lot of relief the next day
00:11:44that
00:11:44there had been no loss of life and you know we gave thanks for that the devastation that it caused
00:11:52you
00:11:52can't help not just as a fire officer but as a human being feeling the impact that that is going
00:12:00to have
00:12:00on the local communities seeing the pictures and the overall scale of the devastation in the aftermath
00:12:10you can't help but look at that and just start to really appreciate the task that we had on that
00:12:17day
00:12:1817 houses suffered extensive fire damage most destroyed completely but despite being in the
00:12:25center of the fire miraculously elise's church survived the fire burned all the way around the church
00:12:33but did not touch the walls of the church i'm glad that the church survived but how do i speak
00:12:40to people
00:12:40who've lost everything in their homes you know
00:12:47definitely 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
00:12:59we 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 and that is what is scary
00:13:14the summer of 2022 was eye-opening for us within the london fire brigade
00:13:19if 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 is is huge 2022 was the
00:13:43hottest
00:13:44summer ever in the uk but 15 years earlier 2007 saw one of the wettest summers on record
00:13:53it 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 and it controls
00:14:08lots of the weather that we get here in the uk in summer we expect the jet stream to be
00:14:12quite high
00:14:13up towards iceland and that brings nice warm weather over the uk but in 2007 we were stuck on the
00:14:20wrong
00:14:20side of it it was sat really far south allowing a succession of low pressure systems to move in it
00:14:26didn't move we then got low pressure after low pressure storm after storm over 10 weeks more than
00:14:3310 inches of rain fell on the west midlands two and a half times as much as usual the scene
00:14:39was set
00:14:40for deadly flooding it just kept raining which meant all of those little gaps in the soil just got full
00:14:47and there was nowhere for the water to go and everything is spilling onto the surface
00:14:52but more rain was forecast tali giampa was commander at gloucester fire station right in the crosshairs of
00:15:01the coming storm i received a phone call from a local reporter who said we hear that there's going to
00:15:08be
00:15:09three to four inches of rain coming down tomorrow doesn't sound much but that's about two months worth of
00:15:16rain on ground which is completely saturated we had this moist warm air coming up from france and it
00:15:25just got stuck over the uk which brought a lot of rainfall right in the firing line of this weather
00:15:32was
00:15:32worcestershire and gloucestershire it's the perfect storm isn't it the perfect scenario for major 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 cut
00:15:56off from its neighbors it had broken its banks and was pouring into villages and homes my first call
00:16:02out of the day to an actual rescue was 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 you couldn't have walked down
00:16:18there
00:16:18you couldn't took a fire engine down there the water was flowing just too fast so gone to the boat
00:16:25then went down to the house carried the two people up as we're about to pull away remember a nova
00:16:33voxel nova lifting up off the floor it's really scary this water if you go into it that's it
00:16:41hereford and worcester fire and rescue received more than 2 000 emergency calls in 27 hours
00:16:47around 20 percent of its annual average the radio on the fire engine was continually going fire
00:16:53control was just fielding calls just didn't stop
00:17:05vanya 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 more than a
00:17:38centimeter of rain fell every hour for six straight hours it was a one in a thousand year deluge
00:17:45roads 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
00:18:00smashed rainfall records one recorded a staggering 147 millimeters or nearly six inches of rain in a
00:18:08single day as much as it normally received in more than two months
00:18:11we had train lines blocked we had water everywhere across the fields across people's homes of course
00:18:19and 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
00:18:44it was just in time as floodwaters barreled towards her house it was like a wave of water coming down
00:18:51the
00:18:51main road before 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
00:19:13steve rushed to sedgeborough as the scale of the disaster became clear the radio message come to us
00:19:20multiple risk to life in the sedgeborough area multiple rescues required
00:19:23the scene that greeted him was like something from a hollywood disaster movie i've not seen anything
00:19:29like it ever the 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 if i believe it was in
00:20:15our boat
00:20:16caught it with the engine we could feel it scraping over the top of cars as well
00:20:21heard all the helicopters overhead and sirens you could hear all these sirens going off
00:20:27i just remember my heart beating really quickly i'm thinking you know you think you're calm but
00:20:32you're not actually calm so your heart's going it's racing
00:20:38i was sitting there thinking oh god what if i go into labor now her being heavily pregnant was a
00:20:43massive
00:20:43priority wouldn't rescue but two lives isn't it i think they thought you know they need to get me
00:20:50on 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 emergency workers
00:21:18were desperate to evacuate her she was in the front bedroom window on the second floor and the water
00:21:24was just under her bedroom window raf were there it's raining it's really cold it's getting quite dark
00:21:33i didn't see the helicopter of bugby i could hear them but i couldn't actually see them
00:21:40she'd lifted herself up into the window sill the boat was there before and then the helicopter was
00:21:45above then my little boy start crying and he was starting to get scared and you know mummy mummy mummy
00:21:56and she was sort of half out within a minute or so of us getting there a winchman came down
00:22:02this
00:22:04man put this harness around me and i thought oh it's because it's going to get me into the boat
00:22:10the next i remember is i was about 100 150 feet up in the air
00:22:16i'm stood on a 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
00:22:41vania was one of more than 60 people airlifted from the local area nearly 90 homes were evacuated
00:22:51with vania 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 incident to incident
00:23:03i 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 and
00:23:20off we
00:23:20went 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
00:23:52there were all these other people not knowing what was happening drenched from the rain they
00:23:57were just trying 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 situated where the rivers
00:24:16seven and avon meet tewkesbury became the the place of greatest danger by 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 and spilling
00:24:37out onto the floodplain
00:24:40what we're dealing with is high flowing water so torrents of water passing through tewkesbury where
00:24:47where the river has burst its banks powerful currents that would simply sweep people away
00:24:55the devastating torrents of water in tewkesbury claimed the life of mitchell taylor caught in flood water
00:25:02as he returned home that evening we put together a search operation the use of hovercrafts within 10
00:25:10minutes they radioed a message back to me to say that they'd found someone three people died in gloucestershire
00:25:18and one in worcestershire as a result of the floods in 2007 thousands were out of their homes for up
00:25:25to two
00:25:25years when i got back to the house it was a couple of days later it was really shocking
00:25:33upturned cars in the street toys being swept away
00:25:41literally it looked like a war zone
00:25:46the earliest someone got back into the house was i think about six to eight months
00:25:51i was out two years all these houses were ruined absolutely ruined huge a 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
00:26:16in the summer of 2007 7 000 people were rescued
00:26:22it was on a scale that we'd never seen before nowhere was unscathed many people lost their property
00:26:29and 13 people died it was truly awful more would have lost their lives if not for the efforts of
00:26:37the
00:26:37emergency services we were very challenged to be honest however we did i think save 20 people's lives
00:26:46we'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 served 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 that's
00:27:17ever happened to me but i also feel very lucky that i came out of it unscathed
00:27:24you know my daughter was born perfectly healthy the material stuff we replaced it's something i'm not
00:27:31i don't think i'm ever going to forget
00:27:362007 saw devastation come from the sky but just over 50 years earlier it came from the sea
00:27:44in january 1953 a wall of water whipped up by 100 mile per hour winds left a trail of death
00:27:52and
00:27:52destruction as it surged across the east coast of the uk 400 people were still reported missing on candy
00:27:59it 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 outside playing anyway
00:28:25well we were always together we got on very well
00:28:33she was my best friend and um she was a lovely little thing full of fun and made everybody laugh
00:28:40edna had recently moved to canvey island in essex a popular location for families moving from london after
00:28:48the second world war it 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
00:29:10for 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
00:30:11wall had broken as i came out of our gate all i could hear was people's screams coming from the
00:30:18other side of the island can the island was the final destination for a storm that had ravaged the
00:30:25entire eastern seaboard of britain low pressure system developed over scotland it moved around an arc
00:30:32across the north down the east coast as the center of the system deepened the pressure got lower and
00:30:38lower and the winds just got stronger and stronger we measure low pressure systems depressions in
00:30:46something called millibars this one was particularly low 964 and that means that the level of the sea gets
00:30:54sucked up a little bit like you're sucking a straw when the pressure drops this low it can cause the
00:31:01sea to
00:31:02rise 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
00:31:28the spring tide is when we have the earth the moon and the sun all in a line and that
00:31:33means that gravity is
00:31:34pulling that water onto the shore so on top of that normal tide you've got a lot more water than
00:31:41normal
00:31:42when high tide struck it was a full two meters higher than usual
00:31:47the area impacted was huge 160 000 acres all the way from yorkshire right the way down to the thames
00:31:54estuary
00:31:55when it hit canvey island it was more than sea defenses could take canvey island dates back to
00:32:01the 17th century and it was created by the dutch much of it is below sea level even now so
00:32:07the dutch
00:32:07built a lot of big sea walls to try and protect it from the raging tides these sea walls were
00:32:14actually
00:32:14generally built of mud but the problem is if particularly high tide that breaches them it can
00:32:20wash away the wall from the other side washed 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
00:32:44it 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 norfolk had been knocked down warnings were not passed to the counties further south until it
00:33:07was too late half asleep and with no time to prepare edna and her family were faced with a terrifying
00:33:15wall
00:33:15of freezing sea water rushing into the house her father had to act fast to save his young family from
00:33:21drowning it was a little window and my dad smashed that and he went out backwards like this and over
00:33:31the
00:33:31top of that pulled himself over the top of the roof and then he climbed onto the corrugated iron roof
00:33:39and somehow or other i don't know he must have got tremendous strength that night but he smashed the
00:33:45corrugated iron in with his bare hands
00:33:50and that made a shoot down to where we were so that we could climb up and get on the
00:33:57roof
00:33:58by the time we got there the sea was on the gutters it was a good eight nine feet high
00:34:07the 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 worse hit than any other part of the island
00:34:20canvey had these what they call party sea walls case an area one area sea wall broke it wouldn't affect
00:34:27the
00:34:27rest of it the sea breached the first wall and then didn't reach the second wall so it just stayed
00:34:34there in a sea wall kept the water where it was that is unfortunately what caused a lot of the
00:34:41people
00:34:41to be really flooded badly
00:34:46there was water all around us just swirling
00:34:49it was really winter cold freezing cold high wind you couldn't see anything except the water
00:34:58with blankets and clothes sodden the freezing night provided just as much danger as the water
00:35:06judith and i were in our 90s dad was in his underpants and mum was in a little cotton dressing
00:35:12gown
00:35:13and we sat on the roof cuddling up together to keep warm that's where we spent the night
00:35:21temperatures were well below average hovering around zero degrees
00:35:26coldest 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
00:35:38dad was trying to fight to come back and he said keep shouting for help ed and he said shout
00:35:45shout and
00:35:46i kept sitting up and shouting help help help he said keep it up ed that's bringing me back he
00:35:52could hear me
00:35:53it 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
00:36:20we saw a man on the other side of the field dive into the sea and go try and swim
00:36:26for it
00:36:27we don't think he survived it was so cold
00:36:31the bungalows on canvey especially the newlands area a lot of those were sort of prefabricated type
00:36:39bungalows some of them were washed off of their foundations and it was just a total devastation
00:36:47can't go down the foundations can't go low into the ground because the water table is very high
00:36:52so essentially the cement bases are pretty much sitting on top of the ground and that makes them
00:36:58particularly vulnerable
00:37:01we saw a house like ours come off its concrete base and just move in the water and it was
00:37:11coming
00:37:11right to us and i can remember dad saying we're done for now there was a submerged tree and as
00:37:21the house
00:37:22floated by it hit that tree under the water and it came by us in about six foot away it
00:37:32was really
00:37:32unbelievable that it missed us dad 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
00:37:47with so many people underwater getting rescue boats to everyone was an almost impossible task
00:37:54we 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 i
00:38:07suppose
00:38:08they were ambulance men piggybacked us all along the seawall judith and i were put in that ambulance
00:38:18we were just both taken off to south end general hospital and when we got there they took me one
00:38:25way 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
00:38:45one boy the boy at school that i knew perished as well my parents had a greengrocer shop in high
00:38:53street and the 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 can be 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 history
00:39:27it was devastating mum was never the same
00:39:33she 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
00:40:22casualties and chaos were still being discovered many victims stood little chance
00:40:28it took more lives than any other onshore storm for at least a hundred years
00:40:33he was larger than life character very sociable very well thought of
00:40:42he was a very involved dad he would get up very early in the mornings and take me to the
00:40:49swimming
00:40:49training he was just there for everything that we did he was always there
00:40:53okay
00:41:01theron 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
00:41:16ships in the atlantic who released weather balloons up to take in information about the
00:41:22air pressure as this storm developed it became really very low pressure indeed 949 millibars
00:41:30that's extremely low and the center of that system gets lower and lower in pressure
00:41:36the winds get very very strong this weather system became really very devastating it was a weather
00:41:43bomb my dad was john smith he was chief inspector at police headquarters in winchester i was
00:41:52working as a riding instructor at hms dryad it was a really windy day so on the morning he'd
00:41:59left work before me he'd made comment that he was going to see if the trees were still
00:42:04standing the way he went to work and we just 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
00:42:31and 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
00:43:14yeah i mean i think about it all the time i you know if i'm driving around and it's windy
00:43:19it's always 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
00:43:38hitting highly populated areas in england and wales head on in the heart of the day
00:43:45everybody was out going to work and school half a million homes without power three million trees
00:43:52were down roads were impacted there were overturned vehicles and trees blocking them
00:43:57railway shut the airports shut ports shut wiltshire saw average hourly wind speeds of 47 miles per hour
00:44:08many schools across the county were still in session
00:44:20i joined grange infants uh in 89 i was 10 years old literally still trying to settle in and make
00:44:28friends that week it was cursed because we'd had two firearms went off you know you just knew something
00:44:34was going to happen you're always waiting for that third event to take place listening to the wind in
00:44:40the classroom it was rattling the windows it was really only the sound that made you think there was
00:44:46anything wrong and 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
00:45:13quite how bad it was i didn't know we'd had a teaching assistant that day and we were talking
00:45:22about the weather and she was just going through the um the gale force wind scale
00:45:26you were perhaps around six or seven you know by her description and she just explains the gale force 10
00:45:33and
00:45:35the roof just peeled off like a tin of sardines
00:45:42it started with the noise and it was out of nowhere absolutely terrifying
00:45:48the roof just picked up and disappeared
00:45:54the only way i can describe it is the sound of a building being torn in two
00:46:02you just heard this almighty bang
00:46:07and then just just the wind really the wind just overtook everything the the howling
00:46:13was right above you and it was it was quite overwhelming all hell broke loose it felt like
00:46:20being 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
00:46:30storm it was hitting you in the face children were screaming teachers were screaming it was absolute
00:46:39bedlam and we could hear like just shouting someone get under the tables get under the tables i could
00:46:45see pupils under tables um screaming and crying and not knowing what to do
00:46:53i went back to to try and get them and i'm i've been told i got several people out from
00:46:58under the
00:46:58tables 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 out 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
00:47:25see
00:47:26the other classroom on the end you could see people coming out just covered in rubble the gable end had
00:47:34collapsed
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 fallen down and a big pile i remember looking up and seeing the
00:47:58blackboard
00:47:58had gone but there were framed pictures bizarrely still still on the wall and it was little elements
00:48:05like 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 of the classroom as soon
00:48:37as
00:48:37we can how did everybody react we were all scared at 10 years old all sorts of things run through
00:48:45your mind
00:48:45you you 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 and they must
00:48:58have been going through a traumatic experience as well something they don't expect to happen
00:49:02my deputy head who ran the the class where the roof came off kept the children very much you know
00:49:09and was really trying to calm them the majority of injuries seemed to be uh related to the fiberglass
00:49:17that was strewn everywhere i had to go to hospital i had swallowed some and i had throat damage
00:49:23people had it in their eyes the injured children were taken care of and then taken away by ambulance to
00:49:30the hospital for medical attention however one girl did lose her life emily mcdonald
00:49:38sadly a friend of ours emily lost her life in the accident
00:49:46arguably the burns day storm saw the most severe gales of the 20th century both for its geographical
00:49:51extent and 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 it's not an easy thing to forget it's not an easy thing to put
00:50:13behind you
00:50:16something like that impacts your life greatly the only people that understand it are those that have
00:50:23experienced it it was a complete tragedy it was just a freak event which ended in horror i certainly
00:50:35wouldn't wish on to anybody else
00:50:58woke up that morning and said to george the new baby was about to be born
00:51:04i need to get to hospital we pulled the blinds and oh there was snow everywhere
00:51:12in 1982 a devastating winter saw the mercury in the uk dip to its lowest ever point at least 1
00:51:20000
00:51:20people died of hypothermia the extraordinary low temperatures accompanied snow that wreaked havoc on
00:51:27communities across the uk we had this area of low pressure coming across the atlantic and it brought
00:51:33a huge amount of snow on the 7th of january it started to snow on an epic scale
00:51:42in 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
00:52:16by the time it 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
00:53:16there were cars buried there were signs buried nothing could move
00:53:24for anyone needing hospital it was a matter of life or death
00:53:38the worst blizzard to hit northern ireland in generations couldn't have come at a worse time
00:53:44for noreen dinsmore i woke up that morning and i well it's hard to explain you just know that your
00:53:51baby's on the move going 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
00:54:09i had never seen a snow like it
00:54:14snow was right up to my knees i can remember walking through it and it was like very deep
00:54:20noreen's husband george had called the emergency services but the 12-foot drifts of snow meant
00:54:26getting to the house was impossible and the ambulance was forced to wait for noreen in a car park a
00:54:32mile 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
00:54:56i thought he was going to leave me up to the village to meet the ambulance but
00:55:00all of a sudden the 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 there was
00:55:30the
00:55:30ambulance waiting for me i got to hospital and i can remember the nurse said to me
00:55:37knowing we need to get this baby born i said and we retired
00:55:43next thing then i don't know what happened to put next thing i had a baby girl beautiful 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 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
00:56:15imagine how scary that must have been for mom it 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 happy
00:56:29ending when i think about it now and thinking about the story now i'm saying how did i do it
00:56:36how did i do it
00:56:38for many years we used to get stopped by the local people in the village and they would always ask
00:56:44mom
00:56:44which one of these is the snow baby the day after marguerite was born temperatures plummeted even
00:56:51further more places across the uk than any time in history saw a mind-numbing minus 20 degrees recorded
00:56:59what happened on the 9th and 10th of january of 1982 was down to this thing called a polar vortex
00:57:05so
00:57:05above the north pole there's very very very cold air that swells around around the polar vortex
00:57:11collapsed and it became penetrated much further south a vast train of arctic hair heading straight
00:57:17for us which is why we got these record-breaking sub-zero temperatures on the 10th of january england
00:57:23saw its lowest ever temperature minus 26.1 degrees in scotland the record of minus 27.2 that had stood
00:57:33for 86
00:57:33years was equaled we had no water our upstairs toilet froze my grandfather be trying the defrost pipes
00:57:46with a little blowtorch but it was so cold it wasn't doing any good i remember running back and
00:57:53forth quite a bit for snow to make cups of tea and keep warm with temperatures colder than those at
00:58:03the
00:58:03south pole the snow wasn't going anywhere even major cities like cardiff and swansea were cut off
00:58:10not only from emergency help but essential supplies they had to queue for bread milk and nothing could
00:58:18get into the village and they were only allowed one 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 i don't think
00:58:41we have a cigar 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
00:59:20noticed 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
00:59:44at around 10 45 a.m on december 7 2006 a squall of thunderclouds accelerated eastwards towards london
00:59:52bringing rain hail and lightning to one of the uk's most populated areas it was now a violently rotating
00:59:592.4 kilometer wide vortex of 150 mile per hour winds i was on duty in wembley the weather on
01:00:09that day was
01:00:09a normal sort of wintry day i was working from home just going around doing my daily work
01:00:17working in meetings sending emails it was about 11 o'clock the sky suddenly went jet black
01:00:28the winds rose there was almost like a static electricity buzz in the air thunder and lightning
01:00:36terrific hail storm i can remember thinking you know we're in for a real downpour
01:00:43a few minutes later my pager um sounded i could sort of hear the pitter patter of what i thought
01:00:50was rain on the window as i looked up at the window i noticed that there were no beads of
01:00:56water because
01:00:57i was thinking like it's not getting wet and in fact what was hitting the window looked like grit or
01:01:05dirt or
01:01:06sand um that was touching i think that was the first sign that something was actually
01:01:13not usual but it wasn't long until things really did start to change
01:01:21there 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 could
01:01:45hear this this roaring sound i actually honestly thought there was a plane going to crash you could
01:01:52see this cloud just drop to the ground in a massive funnel which was about maybe 20 or 30 meters
01:01:58wide
01:01:58it was really fat
01:02:02a tornado is violently 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 seconds before 11 o'clock the swirling thunderclouds traveling over
01:02:29london turned into a tornado all hell just broke loose and that's when everything started flying
01:02:38large pieces of brick cement
01:02:46wood 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 your
01:03:11life because it was so close
01:03:15and it was then pretty eerily quiet tornadoes are actually not that unusual we tend to see about 30
01:03:22in any given year we don't often think about the uk having tornadoes it's something we often associate
01:03:29with southeast asia or america with the tornado alley but actually per square meter of earth in the world
01:03:37the uk has more tornadoes than anyone else where this one hit was the problem it was highly residential
01:03:44the tornado tore a 2.7 kilometer wide trail of destruction through cancel rise
01:03:50walking from the control units to where the scene of devastation i can only describe it as
01:03:57was like walking through some sort of time portal in a sci-fi film on one side everything was fairly
01:04:05normal apart from the mountains of litter and 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 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 cancel 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 her house was
01:05:18literally like blown out there was a van parked in the middle of the road and every piece of glass
01:05:27in
01:05:27the van was broken and the chap was still sitting in there and he was just as white as a
01:05:33sheet shaking
01:05:34the look on his face i'll never forget him miraculously no one died in kensal rise but the power of
01:05:42the tornado did cause real harm
01:05:45there were six people injured and five with minor injuries and one person with fairly severe head injuries
01:05:51could have been far far worse
01:05:58i think for a lot of people it was quite a sad day because
01:06:03many of them wouldn't be able to come back into their properties for
01:06:06several months even years in some cases it's not habitable so they will be i wouldn't have thought
01:06:15they'll be able to go in there until the roof is repaired so a good few months the roof's mostly
01:06:18blown
01:06:19off so we need to secure it so there's no water damage no i think it will stick in my
01:06:24mind forever
01:06:24and i won't forget the images in my mind about the actual sort of size and scale of it and
01:06:29the
01:06:29power it had not something you could easily forget i think it just went really dark me and my friend
01:06:37had to hold on to the railing it was that windy and it just went completely black and then just
01:06:41big dust storms flying around everywhere to see that amount of devastation with no apparent cause
01:06:48was something that i don't think anybody can be trained for it's certainly something that will remain
01:06:54with me forever
01:07:24you
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