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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
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 at
00:00:48the uk railway shut the airport's shut it was just total devastation just a freak
00:00:54event which ended in horror told by those who lived through it it still has an impact on me to
00:01:04this
00:01:04day and those who battled bravely to save lives i've been to terrorist incidents bomb blasts and it
00:01:10looked like that it was probably as scary as serving a northern islander fighting to survive
00:01:16britain's most deadly weather
00:01:31in 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 we'd 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 and 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
00:02:58know our churches tend to remain cool 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
00:03:11uh 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 spread
00:03:27at 934 999 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 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
00:03:56two miles from where she was conducting the funeral standing outside the crematorium and i could see
00:04:02smoke 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 winnington is on fire
00:04:15at six minutes past one fire crews were dispatched to winnington 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 winnington
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
00:05:09the prolonged heat of the past month meant winnington 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
00:05:31the driest july since 1935 created thirsty air which had sucked all the water from the vegetation
00:05:38the bone dry grass that surrounded the semi-rural part of london meant fires could rapidly spread
00:05:45it spread very very quickly to the marshland as well as all the way along winnings and roads
00:05:52within 40 minutes joe had requested 15 fire engines to attend
00:05:58more than 100 firefighters fought the blaze as it threatened homes possessions and human life
00:06:05it all moved so quickly people you know were trying to figure out what do i pack up what do
00:06:11i take with
00:06:12me really lives were in danger
00:06:28this was properties cars outbuildings grassland marshland this was a village alight
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
00:06:53officers battled to contain the inferno residents were knocking on one another's doors getting one
00:07:00another out of the village doing whatever it took people were escaping in what they had a lot of
00:07:09disbelief disorientation just not really understanding what was going on two hours after the fire started
00:07:16it had traveled 200 meters through the village destroying half a dozen homes and covering nearby
00:07:22fields villages had to find shelter wherever they could they came down and took refuge here in the
00:07:27church thinking it would be a safe place i kept finding wet tea towels and it took me a moment
00:07:34to
00:07:34realize that people have been using those as masks to you know get through the smoke i would be looking
00:07:41at
00:07:42houses and vehicles that an hour later would be completely burnt i joined the london fire brigade
00:07:49who save people to save property to put fires out and on that day there were properties that we
00:07:58weren't going to be able to save at 12 minutes past three in the afternoon our peak temperature came
00:08:0640.3 degrees celsius at coningsby in lincolnshire london was just 0.1 degrees behind
00:08:15it was now 16 degrees hotter than average we're trained to to respond and operate in high temperatures
00:08:23and extreme temperatures but they are generally for shorter spaces of time what we experienced on the
00:08:3319th of july was a protracted exposure seven members of the public were treated for heat exhaustion
00:08:41it was vital joe stopped his crews from overheating we very quickly uh decided to allow people to
00:08:49not wear their tunics there were garden hoses that members of the public had left out in their front
00:08:56gardens for us to be able to cool ourselves down and to try and bring down your core body temperature
00:09:05whenington was just one of 106 fires across the capital during the record-breaking heat of the 19th
00:09:11of july 26 were big enough to require at least four fire engines to fight as many as 23 injuries
00:09:19were
00:09:19reported the london fire brigade said it was their busiest day they'd had since the second world war
00:09:25fires 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
00:09:53ever 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 winnington 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 instant up till in and around midnight i was very tired
00:10:27physically tired mentally tired the winnings and fires are one of them incidents that i'm probably
00:10:34going 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
00:11:03it was just shocking and overwhelming to see
00:11:10and i 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
00:11:26and august four times the number of the previous year in total 2985 deaths were attributed to the heat
00:11:35of the summer of 2022 remarkably no one in winnington was killed there was a lot of
00:11:42relief the next day that there 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
00:12:11look at that and just start to really appreciate the task that we had on that day 17 houses suffered
00:12:20extensive fire damage most destroyed completely but despite being in the center of the fire miraculously
00:12:27elise's church survived the fire burned all the way around the church but did not touch the walls of the
00:12:35church
00:12:37i'm glad that the church survived but how do i speak to people who've lost everything in their homes you
00:12:43know
00:12:47definitely has changed the village
00:12:49everyone even if they were able to return to their homes experienced some level
00:12:54of 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 and that is what is scary
00:13:14the 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 is is huge
00:13:41unknowingly
00:13:422022 was the hottest summer ever in the uk
00:13:47but 15 years earlier 2007 saw one of the wettest summers on record
00:13:54It 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.
00:14:11In summer we expect the jet stream to be quite high up towards Iceland
00:14:14and that brings nice warm weather over the UK.
00:14:18But in 2007 we were stuck on the wrong side of it.
00:14:21It was sat really far south allowing a succession of low pressure systems to move in.
00:14:26It didn't move.
00:14:27We then got low pressure after low pressure, storm after storm.
00:14:31Over ten weeks more than ten inches of rain fell on the West Midlands,
00:14:36two and a half times as much as usual.
00:14:39The scene was set for deadly flooding.
00:14:42It 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
00:14:49and everything is spilling onto the surface.
00:14:52But more rain was forecast.
00:14:55Tali Giampa was commander at Gloucester Fire Station,
00:14:59right in the crosshairs of the coming storm.
00:15:04I received a phone call from a local reporter.
00:15:07He said, 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 on ground which is completely saturated.
00:15:21We had this moist warm air coming up from France and it just got stuck over the UK which brought
00:15:28a lot of rainfall.
00:15:30Right in the firing line of this weather was Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.
00:15:34It's the perfect storm, isn't it? The perfect scenario for major flooding.
00:15:44There had been around 30 centimeters of rain over Evesham since May.
00:15:48The river Avon was nearly five meters higher than usual.
00:15:52This picturesque town of Evesham in Worcestershire has effectively been cut off from its neighbors.
00:15:58It had broken its banks and was pouring into villages and homes.
00:16:01My first call out of the day to an actual rescue was an elderly couple of both stuck in their
00:16:09house wheelchair bound.
00:16:12We just saw just a massive wall of water all the way down the road.
00:16:17You couldn't have walked down there. You couldn't have took a fire engine down there.
00:16:21The water was flowing just too fast.
00:16:23So got onto the boat, then went down to the house, carried the two people out.
00:16:30As we were about to pull away, I remember a Nova, Vauxhall Nova, lifting up off the floor.
00:16:35It'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% of its annual average.
00:16:50The radio on the fire engine was continually going. Fire control was just fielding calls.
00:16:56It just didn't stop.
00:17:05Vanya Atkins was at home in Sedgborough, right in the centre of the deluge.
00:17:10The devastating effect of the rain was rapidly becoming clear.
00:17:13I was 34 weeks pregnant at the time.
00:17:18I could see it was raining, and then you could see surface water in the road.
00:17:24Then it was getting a bit more, and you're thinking, OK.
00:17:28I could see neighbours getting sandbags out.
00:17:31I'm thinking, OK, this is quite serious now.
00:17:34The rain kept coming on a biblical scale. More than a centimetre of rain fell every hour for six straight
00:17:42hours. It was a one-in-a-thousand-year deluge.
00:17:45Roads were almost impassable at that stage.
00:17:49We are talking about roads that shouldn't flood.
00:17:54Dual carriageways, trunk roads, motorways.
00:17:56On the 20th of July, rain stations across the region smashed rainfall records.
00:18:02One recorded a staggering 147 millimetres or nearly six inches of rain in a single day, as much as it
00:18:09normally 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, and the rivers
00:18:20just didn't go down.
00:18:23I went into the utility room and thinking, oh, it's a bit spongy.
00:18:28And before I know it, water was coming through the floor.
00:18:31I think within about two minutes, it was actually coming in the front of the house.
00:18:37Vanya 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.
00:18:48It was like a wave of water coming down the main road.
00:18:54Before you know it, I think my downstairs was about five, six foot under water.
00:19:01And I'm thinking, God, 34 weeks pregnant, you know, what do you do?
00:19:07And there's no way out now.
00:19:12Steve rushed to Sedgborough as the scale of the disaster became clear.
00:19:17The radio message come to us.
00:19:20Multiple risk to life in the Sedgborough area, multiple rescues required.
00:19:24The scene that greeted him was like something from a Hollywood disaster movie.
00:19:28I've not seen anything like it, ever.
00:19:32The main road was gone.
00:19:35It was just water from building to building.
00:19:40There was no gardens.
00:19:43You couldn't see cars.
00:19:45You couldn't see any of the road furniture.
00:19:4730 mile an hour signs, stop signs.
00:19:48They were all gone.
00:19:50I just remember a white van being in the middle of the road.
00:19:55And the driver got out and tried to get onto the roof.
00:19:59And 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.
00:20:13We went over a stop sign, I believe it was, in our boat, caught it with the engine.
00:20:17We could feel it scraping over the top of cars as well.
00:20:21I heard all the helicopters overhead and sirens.
00:20:25You could hear all these sirens going off.
00:20:27I just remember my heart beating really quickly.
00:20:30I'm thinking, you know, you think you're calm, but you're not actually calm.
00:20:34So your heart's going, it's racing.
00:20:38And I sit there thinking, oh God, what if I go into labour now?
00:20:41Her being heavily pregnant was a massive priority.
00:20:45Wouldn't rescue but two lives, isn't it?
00:20:47I think they thought, you know, they need to get me out.
00:21:04I'm thinking, oh God.
00:21:04I'm thinking, oh God.
00:21:05On the 20th of July, 2007, more than two months of rain fell on the West Midlands in a single
00:21:10day.
00:21:1234 week pregnant Vanya Atkins was trapped in her house by nine feet of flood water.
00:21:17Emergency workers were desperate to evacuate her.
00:21:19She was in the front bedroom window on the second floor and the water was just under her bedroom window.
00:21:27RAF were there.
00:21:29It's raining, it's really cold, it's getting quite dark.
00:21:32I didn't see the helicopter above me.
00:21:37I could hear them, but I couldn't actually see them.
00:21:40She'd lifted herself up into the windowsill.
00:21:43The boat was there before and then the helicopter was above.
00:21:48Then my little boy started crying and he was starting to get scared and, you know, mummy, mummy, mummy.
00:21:56And she was sort of half out.
00:21:59Within a minute or so of us getting there, a winchman came down.
00:22:02This man put this harness around me and I thought, oh, it's because he's going to get me into the
00:22:08boat.
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.
00:22:37It's literally...
00:22:38And you can't take a breath.
00:22:41Vanya was one of more than 60 people airlifted from the local area.
00:22:46Nearly 90 homes were evacuated.
00:22:51With Vanya on her way to hospital, fire crews quickly turned their attention to others in immediate risk of losing
00:22:57their lives.
00:23:00It was massively intense. It was incident to incident to incident.
00:23:08I 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.
00:23:19Couple of cups of coffee and off we went again.
00:23:24Through 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...
00:23:35Yeah.
00:23:36Like nothing I've ever seen.
00:23:40The helicopter landed in the car park of the hospital.
00:23:43That sprayed water around everywhere.
00:23:45Got into the hospital and it was like chaos.
00:23:52Then all these other people had not known what was happening.
00:23:56Drenched from the rain. They were just trying to allocate people.
00:24:00It 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 Severn and Avon meet.
00:24:18Tewkesbury became 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 out
00:24:37onto the flood flame.
00:24:40What we're dealing with is high flowing water, so torrents of water passing through Tewkesbury where the river has burst
00:24:49its banks.
00:24:51Powerful 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 as he returned
00:25:03home that evening.
00:25:04We put together a search operation, the use of hovercrafts.
00:25:09Within ten minutes, they radioed a message back to me to say that they'd found someone.
00:25:16Three people died in Gloucestershire and one in Worcestershire as a result of the floods in 2007.
00:25:23Thousands were out of their homes for up to two years.
00:25:25When I got back to the house, it was a couple of days later.
00:25:28It was really shocking.
00:25:33Upturned cars in the street.
00:25:36Toys 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.
00:25:50I was out two years.
00:25:53All these houses were ruined.
00:25:55Absolutely ruined.
00:25:58Huge, huge amounts of damage.
00:26:03Unliveable.
00:26:04You 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.
00:26:197,000 people were rescued.
00:26:22It was on a scale that we'd never seen before.
00:26:25Nowhere was unscathed.
00:26:27Many people lost their property and 13 people died.
00:26:31It was truly awful.
00:26:34More would have lost their lives if not for the efforts of the emergency services.
00:26:39We were very challenged, to be honest.
00:26:41However, we did, I think, save 20 people's lives.
00:26:46We're proud of the part we played as emergency services.
00:26:52But we don't want to ever experience that ever again.
00:26:55I'd served in the military before and I'd done tours in Northern Ireland and Belfast.
00:26:58It was probably as scary as serving in Northern Ireland, yeah.
00:27:02I hope it was a freak event.
00:27:03I hope it was a one-off.
00:27:05I hope that, you know, I never have to witness that again.
00:27:10Vanya's baby daughter was born healthy a few weeks later.
00:27:15This is probably the most dramatic thing that's ever happened to me.
00:27:19But I also feel very lucky that I came out of it unscathed.
00:27:24You know, my daughter was born perfectly healthy.
00:27:28The material stuff we replaced.
00:27:30It's something I'm not, I 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 destruction as it surged across the east coast of the UK.
00:27:55400 people were still reported missing on Camden.
00:27:59It killed 307 people, one of the deadliest natural disasters on record.
00:28:17I was living with my mum, my dad, and my little sister Judith.
00:28:21Judith and I spent most of our time outside playing anyway.
00:28:26Well, we were always together.
00:28:29We got on very well.
00:28:32She was my best friend, and she was a lovely little thing, full of fun, and made everybody laugh.
00:28:41Edna had recently moved to Canvey Island in Essex, a popular location for families moving from London after the Second
00:28:49World 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.
00:29:05The 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 nighties, and Dad was playing the banjo.
00:29:21He started to cut up newspaper, and he made little string people out of it.
00:29:29When he said, you've got to go to bed, we said, oh, can we do it again tomorrow, Dad, please?
00:29:34Shortly after midnight, the family was awoken by a crash.
00:29:38Mum was sleeping, and as the water came in, the chest of drawers was sort of beginning to float, and
00:29:47the lamp fell off and bashed on the bottom of the bed.
00:29:51And she came running in, and we were, our mattress was just sliding into the sea.
00:29:56Nine-year-old Rod Bishop heard the storm hit from the other side of the island.
00:30:01It was about two o'clock in the morning, my dad's brother run down the road, knocking everybody up, because
00:30:07he'd been informed by the firemen who lived opposite him that the sea wall had broken.
00:30:14As I came out of our gate, all I could hear was people's screams coming from the other side of
00:30:19the island.
00:30:20Canvey Island was the final destination for a storm that had ravaged the entire eastern seaboard of Britain.
00:30:27Low-pressure system developed over Scotland. It moved around an arc across the north, down the east coast.
00:30:35As the centre of the system deepened, the pressure got lower and lower, and the winds just got stronger and
00:30:41stronger.
00:30:43We measure low-pressure systems, depressions, in something called millibars. This one was particularly low, 964.
00:30:52And that means that the level of the sea gets sucked up, a little bit like you're sucking a straw.
00:30:58When the pressure drops this low, it can cause the sea to rise about half a metre up.
00:31:04Wind will also pile water up against the coast, raising the sea level even further.
00:31:09These strong winds cause basically like a bulge of water to move down and down and down to cause a
00:31:16huge storm surge right down the east coast of England.
00:31:19The surge came at the worst possible time. It coincided not just with a high tide, but the highest tide
00:31:26of the month.
00:31:28A 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 pulling that water onto the shore.
00:31:37So on top of that normal tide, you've got a lot more water than normal.
00:31:42When high tide struck, it was a full two metres 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 defences could take.
00:32:00Canvey 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 from the raging tides.
00:32:13These sea walls were actually generally built of mud, but the problem is, if particularly high tide that breaches them,
00:32:20it can wash away the wall from the other side.
00:32:23It 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. It was 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 somebody else's house.
00:32:55People in Canvey Island were not warned about the storm.
00:33:00Telephone lines in Lincolnshire and Norfolk had been knocked down.
00:33:03Warnings were not passed to the counties further south until it was too late.
00:33:10Half asleep and with no time to prepare, Edna and her family were faced with a terrifying wall of freezing
00:33:16sea water rushing into the house.
00:33:18Her father had to act fast to save his young family from drowning.
00:33:22It was a little window and my dad smashed that.
00:33:27And he went out backwards like this and over the top of it, pulled himself over the top of the
00:33:34roof.
00:33:35And 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 corrugated
00:33:46iron in with his bare hands.
00:33:50And that made us 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.
00:34:03It was a good eight, nine feet high.
00:34:07The situation was made worse by the very sea defences 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.
00:34:23In case an area, one area, sea wall broke, it wouldn't affect the rest of it.
00:34:30The sea breached the first wall and then didn't breach the second wall, so it just stayed there in a
00:34:35sea wall, kept the water where it was.
00:34:38That is unfortunately what caused a lot of the people to be really flooded badly.
00:34:45There was water all around us, just swirling.
00:34:49It was really winter, cold, freezing cold, high wind.
00:34:55You 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.
00:35:08Dad was in his underpants and Mum was in a little cotton dressing gown.
00:35:14And we sat on the roof, cuddling up together to keep warm.
00:35:18That'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.
00:35:29My 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.
00:35:44And he said, shout, shout.
00:35:46And I kept sitting up and shouting, help, help, help.
00:35:50He said, keep it up, Ed, that's bringing me back.
00:35:52He could 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 round us, just swirling and swirling.
00:36:11We 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.
00:36:29It was so cold.
00:36:31The bungalows on Canvey, especially the Newlands area, a lot of those were sort of prefabricated type bungalows.
00:36:40Some 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 particularly 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 right to us.
00:37:12And I can remember Dad saying, we're done for now.
00:37:17There 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.
00:37:32It 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.
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.
00:38:05And two lovely men, I suppose they were ambulance men, piggybacked us all along the seawall.
00:38:12Judith and I were put in that ambulance.
00:38:18We were just both taken off to South End General Hospital.
00:38:22And when we got there, they took me one way and they took my sister Judith the other way, which
00:38:29was apparently towards the morgue.
00:38:3558 people lost their lives.
00:38:40Mainly from the area on the north side of the island.
00:38:45The one boy, the boy at school that I knew, perished as well.
00:38:50And my parents had a greengrocer shop in High Street.
00:38:53And my dad was identifying a lot of the people that were drowned or died through hypothermia.
00:39:01It must have been absolutely horrendous.
00:39:06This is a huge death toll as a consequence of the floods.
00:39:09The Isle of Death they call Canvey.
00:39:14307 people died across the UK.
00:39:16This is the biggest natural disaster in the country for the entire 20th century.
00:39:21And one of the biggest in the UK throughout all history.
00:39:27It was devastating. Mum was never the same.
00:39:33She'd lost a child.
00:39:36And 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.
00:40:15But 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.
00:40:25Many victims stood little chance.
00:40:27It took more lives than any other onshore storm for at least 100 years.
00:40:33He was larger than a knife 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.
00:41:14We had some good information coming from ships in the Atlantic,
00:41:17who released weather balloons up to take in information about the air pressure.
00:41:22As this storm developed, it became really very low pressure indeed.
00:41:29949 millibars. That's extremely low.
00:41:32And the centre of that system gets lower and lower in pressure.
00:41:36The winds get very, very strong.
00:41:39This weather system became really very devastating.
00:41:42It was a weather bomb.
00:41:45My dad was John Smith. He was chief inspector at police headquarters in Winchester.
00:41:50I was working as a riding instructor at HMS Dryad.
00:41:55It was a really windy day.
00:41:57So on the morning, he'd left work before me.
00:42:00He'd made comment that he was going to see if the trees were still standing the way he went to
00:42:05work.
00:42:06And 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 until 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 said that, you know, John's been killed.
00:42:48And I obviously asked what had happened.
00:42:55And he just said that a 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.
00:43:17I, you know, if I'm driving around and it's windy, it's always there.
00:43:24That fear that that could happen again.
00:43:30The winds continued to build.
00:43:33Gusts 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.
00:43:48Half a million homes without power.
00:43:51Three million trees were down.
00:43:53Roads were impacted.
00:43:55There were overturned vehicles and trees blocking them.
00:43:58Railways shut.
00:43:59The airports shut.
00:44:00Ports shut.
00:44:02Wiltshire 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 in 89.
00:44:24I was 10 years old.
00:44:26Literally still trying to settle in, make friends.
00:44:29That week it was cursed.
00:44:31Because we'd had two firearms went off.
00:44:33You know, you just knew something was going to happen.
00:44:35You were always waiting for that third event to take place.
00:44:39Listening to the wind in the classroom, it was rattling the windows.
00:44:43It 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.
00:45:13Quite how bad it was, I didn't know.
00:45:17It had a teaching assistant that day.
00:45:21And we were talking about the weather.
00:45:23And she was just going through the Gale Force wind scale.
00:45:27It was perhaps around six or seven, you know, by her description.
00:45:31And she just explained the Gale Force 10.
00:45:34And the roof just peeled off like a tin of sardines.
00:45:42It started with the noise.
00:45:44And it was out of nowhere, absolutely terrifying.
00:45:49The 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.
00:46:03You just heard this almighty bang.
00:46:07And then just the wind, really.
00:46:10The wind just overtook everything.
00:46:12The howling was right above you.
00:46:15And it was quite overwhelming.
00:46:18All hell broke loose.
00:46:19It 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 snowstorm.
00:46:31It was hitting you in the face.
00:46:35Children were screaming, teachers were screaming.
00:46:38It was absolute bedlam.
00:46:40And we could hear, like, just shouting someone, get under the tables, get under the tables.
00:46:44I could see pupils under tables, screaming and crying and not knowing what to do.
00:46:53I went back to try and get them and I've been told I got several people out from under 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.
00:47:11This was so far out of the ordinary that your mind almost couldn't find anything to grasp onto.
00:47:17We all needed to get downstairs as quickly as possible.
00:47:20As we came out to the landing area, I could look across and I could see the other classroom on
00:47:28the end.
00:47:29You 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 the sky and then I saw the roof falling
00:47:54down and a big pile.
00:47:56I remember looking up and seeing the blackboard had gone but there were framed pictures bizarrely still on the wall
00:48:04and it was little elements like that that just stuck in my mind.
00:48:07Out of all of this whirlpool of madness.
00:48:11I was the last person from our class into the hall and just walking into what felt like a scene
00:48:19from a war movie.
00:48:23Children crying, adults crying, people just not knowing what to do, sat quietly or screaming in a corner. It was
00:48:32absolute chaos.
00:48:35Just had to get our heads down and get out of the classroom as soon as we can.
00:48:39How did everybody react?
00:48:40We were all scared.
00:48:42At ten years old, all sorts of things run through your mind. You don't know what's going to happen next.
00:48:47Are you safe?
00:48:48The teachers and the students were obviously very concerned, frightened even.
00:48:55The teachers that day were absolutely amazing. They must have been going through a traumatic experience as well, something they
00:49:01don't expect to happen.
00:49:02My deputy head, who ran the class where the roof came off, kept the children very much and was really
00:49:10trying to calm them.
00:49:12The majority of injuries seem to be related to the fibreglass that was strewn everywhere.
00:49:19I had to go to hospital. I had swallowed some and I had throat damage. People had it in their
00:49:24eyes.
00:49:24The injured children were taken care of and then taken away by ambulance to the hospital for medical attention.
00:49:33However, one girl did lose her life, Emily McDonald.
00:49:37Sadly, 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 extent and
00:49:53its intensity combined.
00:49:54The 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 a tragedy.
00:50:10It's not an easy thing to forget. It's not an easy thing to put behind you.
00:50:17Something like that impacts your life greatly.
00:50:19The only people that understand it are those that have experienced it.
00:50:24It was a complete tragedy.
00:50:27It was just a freak event which ended in horror.
00:50:34I certainly wouldn't wish it on to anybody else.
00:50:57I woke up that morning and said to George, the new baby was about to be born.
00:51:04I need to get to hospital.
00:51:05We 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.
00:51:23The extraordinary low temperatures accompanied snow that wreaked havoc on communities across the UK.
00:51:29We had this area of low pressure coming across the Atlantic and it brought a huge amount of snow.
00:51:37On the 7th of January, it started to snow on an epic scale in what became known as the big
00:51:44snow.
00:51:53I remember going to bed and it was snowing heavy.
00:51:57I would say it was about two to three foot of snow.
00:52:03It just kept mounting up, mounting up and mounting up.
00:52:07It was torrential snow.
00:52:10The snow fell for 36 hours straight, up to a metre settled in parts of Wales.
00:52:16By the time it stopped, villages like Bedlenog were almost completely snowed under.
00:52:25When we woke up in the morning, it was covered.
00:52:32I opened the front door and it was just another ball of snow.
00:52:38It was cold. We're talking minus two to minus four degrees Celsius.
00:52:44The air was pretty dry, so actually it was very powdery snow.
00:52:48So we had huge amounts of wind pushing all of the snow, making massive snow drifts.
00:52:55It was good 12 to 14 foot of snow outside my house.
00:53:03My father came up and he dug us out.
00:53:07The snow cut off entire villages and ambulances and emergency services were unable to get to those in need.
00:53:15There 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 couldn't have come at a worse time for Noreen Dinsmore.
00:53:45I woke up that morning and I, well, it's hard to explain.
00:53:50You just know that your baby's on the move.
00:53:52Going into labour, Noreen desperately needed to get to hospital.
00:53:56It was soon clear the chances of an ambulance arriving to help were vanishingly small.
00:54:03We pulled the blinds and, oh, there was snow everywhere.
00:54:07Couldn't see anything, it was just all snow.
00:54:09I had never seen snow like it.
00:54:14Snow was right up to my knees.
00:54:16I can remember walking through it and it was like very deep.
00:54:20Noreen's husband George had called the emergency services,
00:54:24but the 12-foot drifts of snow meant getting to the house was impossible
00:54:28and the ambulance was forced to wait for Noreen in a car park a mile 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.
00:54:49My 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,
00:55:00but all of a sudden the road was blocked.
00:55:03No tractor, no cars, nothing could walk it.
00:55:09I said, OK, I'm getting off, I'm walking.
00:55:14Deep in labour, Noreen battled through sub-zero temperatures,
00:55:19knowing the baby could come at any moment.
00:55:21We walked and we didn't talk much, we just walked.
00:55:25And we got to car park and there was the ambulance waiting for me.
00:55:33I got to hospital and I can remember the nurse saying to me,
00:55:37Noreen, we need to get this baby born.
00:55:40I said, we'd be tired.
00:55:44Next thing then, I don't know what happened,
00:55:47but next thing I had a baby girl.
00:55:50Beautiful baby girl.
00:55:54I'm Margaret Doyle.
00:55:55I'm 43 years of age.
00:55:58In 1982, I was born in what became known as the big snow.
00:56:03It's terrifying for any mother to go into labour
00:56:06and obviously given the circumstances of the snow
00:56:10and the worry that you're actually not physically,
00:56:12possibly going to even see a medic.
00:56:14I can only imagine how scary that must have been for mum.
00:56:19She was overcome with just relief
00:56:22that hopefully things were going to work out okay.
00:56:25Mum got to hospital just in time when I was born.
00:56:28Thankfully, it was a happy ending.
00:56:30When I think about it now and thinking about the story now,
00:56:35I'm saying, how did I do it?
00:56:37How did I do it?
00:56:39For many years, we used to get stopped by the local people in the village
00:56:42and they would always ask mum, which one of these is a snow baby?
00:56:47The day after Marguerite was born, temperatures plummeted even further.
00:56:52More places across the UK than any time in history
00:56:55saw a mind-numbing minus 20 degrees recorded.
00:56:59What happened on the 9th and 10th of January of 1982
00:57:02was down to this thing called a polar vortex.
00:57:05So above the North Pole, there's very, very, very cold air
00:57:08that swirls round and round.
00:57:10The polar vortex collapsed and it became penetrated much further south.
00:57:14A vast train of Arctic air heading straight for us,
00:57:17which is why we got these record-breaking sub-zero temperatures.
00:57:21On the 10th of January, England saw its lowest ever temperature,
00:57:25minus 26.1 degrees.
00:57:28In Scotland, the record of minus 27.2 that had stood for 86 years was equaled.
00:57:36We had no water. Our upstairs toilet froze.
00:57:42My grandfather would be trying the defrost pipes
00:57:46with a little blowtorch, but it was so cold it wasn't doing any good.
00:57:52I remember running back and forth quite a bit for snow
00:57:56to make cups of tea and keep warm.
00:58:00With temperatures colder than those at the South Pole,
00:58:04the snow wasn't going anywhere.
00:58:06Even major cities like Cardiff and Swansea were cut off.
00:58:10Not only from emergency help, but essential supplies.
00:58:15They had a queue for bread, milk, and nothing could get into the village.
00:58:20And 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.
00:58:32With these sub-zero temperatures and the widespread snowfall,
00:58:35it was thought that in excess of a thousand people lost their lives to hypothermia.
00:58:40I don't think we'll ever see our storm again.
00:59:06I literally finished my morning meetings and was about to take a break.
00:59:12And the day was just normal.
00:59:14It was slightly cloudy.
00:59:16There was no real wind.
00:59:20I noticed that I thought it was raining, but it wasn't.
00:59:23I 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 North London, right?
00:59:44At around 10.45am on December 7th, 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.
00:59:57It was now a violently rotating 2.4-kilometre-wide vortex of 150 mile-per-hour winds.
01:00:05I was on duty in Wembley.
01:00:08The weather on that day was a normal sort of wintry day.
01:00:11I was working from home, just going around doing my daily work, working in meetings, sending emails.
01:00:22It was about 11 o'clock.
01:00:24The sky suddenly went jet black.
01:00:28The wind rose.
01:00:30There was almost like a static electricity buzz in the air.
01:00:34Thunder and lightning.
01:00:36Terrific hailstorm.
01:00:38I can remember thinking, you know, we're in for a real downpour.
01:00:43A few minutes later, my pager sounded.
01:00:47I could sort of hear the pitter-patter of what I thought was rain on the window.
01:00:51As I looked up at the window, I noticed that there were no beads of water.
01:00:56Because I was thinking, like, it's not getting wet.
01:01:01And in fact, what was hitting the window looked like grit or dirt or sand that was touching.
01:01:09I think that was the first sign that something was actually not usual.
01:01:14But it wasn't long until things really did start to change.
01:01:21There was no indication of how large this incident was.
01:01:25I had no idea what conditions I was going to be going into.
01:01:31The sky itself, as I looked up, just turned really, really nearly black.
01:01:38It really seemed to just lower itself as if it was coming right down.
01:01:42And as this was happening, you could hear this roaring sound.
01:01:49I 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,
01:01:56which was about maybe 20 or 30 meters wide.
01:01:59It was really fat.
01:02:02A tornado is a violently rotating column of air.
01:02:06First off, the rotation starts horizontally.
01:02:09And then slowly but surely with the wind shear, it goes vertically.
01:02:12Usually from a cloud, you'll start to see this little funnel cloud coming out of the bottom.
01:02:17But when that cloud touches the ground at that moment, that is when it becomes a tornado.
01:02:25Seconds before 11 o'clock, the swirling thunderclouds travelling over London turned into a tornado.
01:02:31All hell just broke loose and that's when everything started flying.
01:02:37Large pieces of brick, cement, wood, lead started hitting the house.
01:02:50My windows got broken.
01:02:52You could hear things crashing onto the roof of the house.
01:02:57And in front of me, the house is there, glass exploding out of them.
01:03:03The roar was so intense, I took cover.
01:03:06It was truly, you know, shocking.
01:03:09It did make you fear for your life because it was so close.
01:03:15And it was then pretty eerily quiet.
01:03:19Tornadoes are actually not that unusual.
01:03:21We tend to see about 30 in any given year.
01:03:24We don't often think about the UK having tornadoes.
01:03:28It's something we often associate with Southeast Asia or America with the tornado alley.
01:03:33But actually, per square metre of earth in the world, the UK has more tornadoes than anyone else.
01:03:39Where this one hit was the problem. It was highly residential.
01:03:44The tornado tore a 2.7 kilometre wide trail of destruction through Kensal Rise.
01:03:50Walking from the control unit 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.
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.
01:04:19They'd just been ripped off.
01:04:22I've been to terrorist incidents, bomb blasts, and it looked like that.
01:04:26It looked as though a 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 were injured
01:04:46and had been treated on scene by the London Ambulance Service.
01:04:49The tornado ripped through six streets across Kensal 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.
01:05:06There would be a building with no glass in the house at all, roof removed, gable end wall blown down.
01:05:14One of my neighbours, Fiona's, the front of her house was literally 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, and he was just as white as a sheet, shaking.
01:05:34The look on his face, I'll never forget him.
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, 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 many of them wouldn't be able
01:06:04to come back into their properties for several months, even years in some cases.
01:06:11It'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 a good few months.
01:06:18The 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.
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 power it had.
01:06:32Not something you could easily forget, I think.
01:06:35It just went really dark.
01:06:36Me and my friend had to hold onto the railing, it was that windy, and it just went completely black,
01:06:40and then just big dust storms flying around everywhere.
01:06:43To see that amount of devastation, with no apparent cause, was something that I don't think anybody can be trained
01:06:51for.
01:06:52It's certainly something that will remain with me forever.
01:07:26I think one of them now was so important to see that.
01:07:26They were absolutely gentle and incredible and amazing and fabulous, but massive outlay and inclusive they have been there.
01:07:26And so, much fun you've lost.
01:07:26Go!
01:07:27Go!
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