Regardless of how safe, secure and warm we may feel behind our own front doors it does not take much of a weather front to make us feel entirely vulnerable and insignificant against the sheer power of the elements.
Take the complete white-out conditions to which have been exposed in recent years. I have just been out on a few errands and the temperature guage in the car showed a positively balmy 8.5 degrees centigrade for this early part of January. Some twelve months ago we were experiencing average daily temperatures of around minus 2 to minus 4 degrees and these were falling to about minus 8 in the clear nightime conditions.
The sustained severe weather did help us Brits to master the art and patience required for driving in snow and ice which otherwise we only get exposed to and panic over on the odd day through our winter. We became sensible drivers or made the even more sensible decision to leave the car at home and go about on foot or sledge.
I was surprised that, given the apparent numbers of my fellow countrymen and women who escape to the alpine snow resorts every year that I did not come across seasoned skiers, snow-boarders or bob sleighers down our street which does have a bit of a slope and dip. Still, I expect that it is not necessary to actually own the required equipment and keep it at home if again we can on a guaranteed basis only expect the odd, infrequent and fast melting snowy conditions which does not justify the capital outlay and garage storage space.
I have never been skiing or indeed have never felt the urge to go and experience that type of holiday pursuit. I did find some insulated salopettes very useful one winter during an early morning paper round. I trust that they were unisex in style as my younger sister had bought them for a school trip the year before.
We have just had a few days of very high winds which tends to highlight either a lack of maintenance or the need to be a bit more attentive to loose slates, high level woodwork and securing anything that could roll, fall, tumble or escape to cause a nuisance. I lost a car windscreen a few years ago from a loose roof slate from my own house and I still have some anxiety when the westerly wind whistles down the garden and hits the old slate roof causing an audible rattling and creaking of the 90 year old rafters and purlins.
I have further anxiety over the potential for damage and worse from falling masonry from my very substantial chimney stacks and the 6 available projectiles that otherwise serve as chimney pots. This is from witnessing a collapse of a stack onto a car parked on a driveway when I was a student.
Trees and their boughs are also quite unpredictable in high winds. I do find the noise of a full canopy under attack to be very disturbing, again from my own experience of growing up in the shade of a large and later diseased Elm tree which would very frequently shed a large branch after every storm.
The floods which devastated areas of Hull in late June 2007 and even now are affecting a good part of the south and south west of the UK, again illustrate our fragile existence amongst the forces of nature.
I was involved in assessing a few cases of flood damage at the time but also experienced a strange and unbelievable event that left one household wondering whether they had actually seen what had taken place.
The specific case involved a mini tidal wave which had swept down through a number of back gardens of a well to do suburb in West Hull. The persistent rainfall over the previous 36 hours had no-where to drain. The exceptionally wet month of June had swollen the clay sub soils under the City to full water holding capacity.
The house owners who had contacted me had seen the surface water run-off situation developing with a constant flood along the road and verges to the front of their homes and had taken a video out of either morbid curiosity or grave concern. The focus of attention turned to the rear of the house as the wall of water emerged and came towards the house. In a matter of minutes the wave was seen to pass under the house through the airbricks and sweep out to join the frontage flood before rapidly subsiding in volume and force.
I arrived the next day to investigate the damage which was feared to be substantial.
In the bright sunlight and warm, typically summer weather prevailing it was difficult to comprehend what had taken place just the day before. The garden was dry. There were just a few residual puddles on the frontage. There were no indications that anything untoward had occurred in weather terms. The video footage did not pull any punches as to the magnitude of the event. I checked through the ground floor rooms. There was the luxury of a few lifted floorboards to inspect the sub floor space. The attack of the tidal wave was not in doubt but to my amazement there were no indications of any major wetting or damage anywhere under the house.
Many surrounding homes had not been so fortunate. The local streets soon took on the appearance of a holiday camp as static caravans arrived as temporary accommodation whilst the inundated properties were repaired over many following months.
The flooding of late June 2007 was attributed to a combination of freakish events including severe weather and poor drains maintenance and these have not fortunately manifested in any threatening form subsequently in spite of a few and understandably nervous householders when heavy and persistent rainfall is forecast.
I worked for some years along the low lying Lincolnshire coast and could guarantee to find dampness in any house built before the early 1950's as a consequence of the devastating coastal flooding of 31st January 1953. The event had developed through a combination of coincidences and phenomena which could be truly regarded as a one in a thousand year probability. A weather system of low pressure in the Atlantic contributed to a swell of sea levels around the north of Scotland. Not in itself an unusual seasonal factor but coupled with a strong northerly wind funnelling the tide between the British Isles and Norway a surge of over eight feet developed. This overwhelmed many coastal areas and defences with high loss of life in England and the Low Countries and with significant populated and rural areas under salt water flood.
As with many natural disasters the full impact can only be comprehended through the first hand experiences of those who were there at the time. Current thinking on global warming and an anticipated rise in sea levels has however been a matter of wide contemporary discussion.
The Deep, the renowned Submarium in Hull has a display on the projected affect of rising tides in our local area.
Much of the low lying Hull urban areas will be submerged and Doncaster will have a few years to prepare for its new found but enforced status as a seaside town.
My next house move will certainly consider an elevated height above sea level as a definite WOW! factor.
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