Winter is here once again – the time of the year when we hunker down in our homes and wait for the storms of these months to pass. Of course at this time of the year we are lucky to have the warm and comfortable homes that protect us from the winter weather – it is wise before winter to give your home a health check – have repairs done to roofing, outbuildings and of course if your heating is broken have it professionally repaired by someone like this emergency plumber Gloucester based https://www.hprservicesltd.com/emergency-plumber-gloucester/ and this should help our homes to see us through the winter months.
In the UK we are lucky that the weather we have is generally not too bad, even in the depths of winter – but every so often we do have extreme weather and it can be hard to predict and cause a lot of damage. Here are some of the UKs worst weather events in history…
The Snowfall of 1947 – In a country that was recovering from the trials and tribulations of war, when the economy was suffering as well as many of the people of the country, the timing of this huge snowfall would have struggled to have been worse. In January 1947 the snow started to fall, and temperatures plummeted. Not something that unusual in the UK. But the snow kept falling and over the next two months, snow kept falling all over the UK. Drifts of snow could be up to 10 metres; the ground was frozen solid making agriculture nigh on impossible and supplies that were already short were struggling to get to where they were needed due to the large snow drifts on the roads and railway lines. Another problem was power, as miners were unable to get to work at the mines and supplies of coal ran dangerously close to empty.
The Great Storm of 1953 – In 1953 another storm arrived, which caused a devastating loss of life. Striking from the North Sea at the end of January, the East of the UK came under assault as the winds and rains caused widespread flooding to the low-lying land, agricultural land was ruined by flood waters and by salt water that had blown in from the sea. A ferry in the North Sea at the time sunk causing people to drown, and on land many people also drowned as homes and entire villages were hit with the heavy deluge of the flood waters.
The Hurricane of 1987 – This infamous storm is probably best remembered by the weather reporter Michael Fish at the time stating that night that a lady had phoned the BBC to warn of a hurricane but not to worry there was no hurricane on the way. Unfortunately, there was, and the hurricane hit Cornwall later that night and rampaged across the south of England causing loss of life and the uprooting of around 15 million trees, many of which were hundreds of years old.
