Great storm of 1987

The first gale warnings for sea areas in the English Channel were issued at 0630 UTC on 15 October and were followed, four hours later, by warnings of severe gales.[13] At 1200 UTC on 15 October, the depression, which originated in the Bay of Biscay, was centred near 46° N, 9° W and its depth was 970 hPa (29 inHg). By 1800 UTC, it had moved north-east to about 47° N, 6° W, and deepened to 964 hPa (28.5 inHg).

At 2235 UTC, winds of Force 10 were forecast. By midnight, the depression was over the western English Channel, and its central pressure was 953 hPa (28.1 inHg). At 0140 on 16 October, warnings of Force 11 were issued. The depression now moved rapidly north-east, filling a little as it did, reaching the Humber Estuary at about 0530 UTC, by which time its central pressure was 959 hectopascals (28.3 inHg). Dramatic increases in temperature were associated with the passage of the storm's warm front.

In some sea areas, warnings of severe weather were both timely and adequate, although forecasts for land areas left much to be desired. During the evening of 15 October, radio and TV forecasts mentioned strong winds, but indicated that heavy rain would be the main feature, rather than wind. By the time most people went to bed, exceptionally strong winds had not been mentioned in national radio and TV weather broadcasts.

Warnings of severe weather had been issued, however, to various agencies and emergency authorities, including the London Fire Brigade. Perhaps the most important warning was issued by the Met Office to the Ministry of Defence (MoD) at 0135 UTC, 16 October. It warned that the anticipated consequences of the storm were such that civil authorities might need to call on assistance from the military.

Storm damaged building, Barton on Sea in Hampshire

A highest gust of 220 km/h; 137 mph (119 kn) is estimated from satellite data at Quimper, Brittany, with the highest measured gust at 217 km/h; 135 mph (117 kn) at Pointe du Roc, Granville, Normandy.[3]

In south-east England, where the greatest damage occurred, gusts of 130 km/h; 81 mph (70 kn) or more were recorded continually for three or four consecutive hours. During this time, the wind veered from southerly to south-westerly. To the north-west of this region, there were two maxima in gust speeds, separated by a period of lower wind speeds. During the first period, the wind direction was southerly. During the latter, it was south-westerly. Damage patterns in south-east England suggested that tornadoes accompanied the storm.

In the UK, winds at Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex reached 190 km/h; 120 mph (100 kn) before the anemometer failed.[3][14][15] Many anemometers were reliant on mains power, and ceased recording as the south east of the United Kingdom was blacked-out by power cuts, thus losing much valuable data.[12] Winds with an estimated 200-year return period hit the counties of Kent, Sussex, Berkshire, Hampshire, and along the coastal strip of Essex, Suffolk, and South Eastern Norfolk.[12] North of a line from Portland Bill, Dorset to Cromer, Norfolk the return period of the respective gusts were under 10 years.[12]

Sustained winds speeds greater than 121 km/h (75 mph) were recorded for over an hour in southern Britain.[16] According to the Beaufort scale of wind intensities, this storm had winds of hurricane force 12 (117 km/h [73 mph] or greater); as the term hurricane refers to tropical cyclones originating in the North Atlantic or North Pacific, the descriptor "great storm" has tended to be reserved for those storms in recent years reaching this velocity. Hurricanes have a very different wind profile and distribution from storms, and significantly higher precipitation levels.

Storm damage in London

Fallen tree and upturned benches in London's Leicester Square

The storm made landfall in Cornwall, and tracked north-east towards Devon and then over the Midlands, going out to sea via The Wash. The strongest gusts, of up to 100 knots (190 km/h; 120 mph), were recorded along the south-eastern edge of the storm, hitting mainly Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex, Essex, and Kent. The Royal Sovereign lighthouse 6 miles (9.7 km) off Eastbourne recorded the highest hourly-mean wind speed in the UK on its instruments at 75 kn (139 km/h; 86 mph).[17] The counties of Dorset[18] and Surrey were also heavily affected.[19]

The storm caused substantial damage over much of England, felling an estimated 15 million trees[20] (including six of the seven eponymous oaks in Sevenoaks,[21] historic specimens in Kew Gardens, Wakehurst Place, Nymans Garden, Hyde Park, London and Scotney Castle[22] and most of the trees making up Chanctonbury Ring). At Bedgebury National Pinetum, Kent almost a quarter of the trees were brought down.[23][24] There have been many claims that the damage to forestry was made worse by broadleaf trees still being in leaf at the time of the storm, though this was not borne out by an analysis by the Forestry Commission.[25]

Fallen trees blocked roads and railways and left widespread structural damage primarily to windows and roofs. Several hundred thousand people were left without power, not fully restored until more than two weeks later. Local electric utility officials later said they lost more wires in the storm than in the preceding decade. At sea, as well as many small boats being wrecked, a Sealink cross-channel ferry, the MV Hengist, was driven ashore at Folkestone and the bulk carrier MV Sumnea capsized at Dover, Kent.[26] The Radio Caroline ship MV Ross Revenge weathered the storm in the north sea, being one of the few ships to be in the North Sea during the storm; it being a radio ship, it also provided radio broadcasts to thousands while most stations were offline.[27]

The National Grid sustained heavy damage during the event, as crashing cables short-circuited, which in some cases overheated the main system. Its headquarters faced the choice of keeping the grid online to help London as the storm approached but risk an incremental system breakdown, failure and burnout, or to shut down most of South East England including London and avert that risk. The headquarters made the decision, the first one like it since before World War II: to shut down the South East power systems to maintain the network as soon as signs of overheating began.[28]

At Clayton, West Sussex, one of the village's recently restored windmills, Jill, sustained severe damage to its mechanisms and caught fire during the storm. The mill's brakes had been applied prior to the storm, but the high winds were able to rotate the sails and overcome the brakes, creating friction which set the mill's antique timbers on fire. Members of the Jack and Jill Windmills Society were able to put the fire out, carrying water up the hill to douse the flames.[29]

In London, many of the trees lining streets, particularly plane trees, were blown down overnight, blocking roads and crushing parked cars. Building construction scaffolding and billboards collapsed in many places, and many buildings were damaged. The following morning, the BBC's Current Affairs Production Centre at the former Lime Grove Studios in Shepherd's Bush, was unable to function due to a power failure – ITV's TV-am and BBC1's Breakfast Time programmes were broadcast from different emergency facilities in emergency formats. TV-am broadcast from Thames Television's Euston Road studios, while BBC newsreader Nicholas Witchell had to broadcast from the BBC1 continuity studio at BBC Television Centre, with the wall decorations used for Children's BBC hastily taken down. Much of the public transport in the capital was not functioning, and people were advised against trying to go to work. TV-am host Anne Diamond did go back to the regular TV-am studio with reporter Kay Burley, whilst Richard Keys remained in the Thames Television studio in case the power supply situation became even worse, and indeed, power did go back down at around 8:15 am.

The départements of Finistère, Morbihan, Côtes-d'Armor, and Ille-et-Vilaine in Brittany, and the Cotentin Peninsula (Manche and part of Calvados) in Normandy were the areas in France most affected by the storm, which followed a line from Morbihan and Rennes to Deauville.[30] 1.79 million homes were left without electricity supply and water, and a quarter of Brittany's forest was destroyed. The total damage was estimated at ₣23 billion.

Météo France announced "une petite tempête en provenance des Açores" (a little storm coming in from the Azores), which reached Brittany's coast at about 18:00, later than expected. This depression caused little damage, with only 50 to 60 km/h (31 to 37 mph; 27 to 32 kn) winds. A much deeper depression hit Ushant on the extreme western tip of Brittany at midnight. It was measured at 948 mbar (28.0 inHg) at the Brest-Guipavas weather station, the lowest reading in its records dating back to 1945.[30]

Weather stations on the coast at pointe du Raz, pointe Saint-Mathieu and Penmarch gave no readings, as they were damaged by the high winds. The wind speed measured at Brest was 148 km/h (92 mph; 80 kn). The centre of the storm crossed Brittany from Penmarch to Saint-Brieuc at 110 km/h (68 mph; 59 kn), with gusts of wind up to 187 km/h (116 mph; 101 kn) at Quimper, 200 km/h (120 mph; 110 kn) at Ushant, and 220 km/h (140 mph; 120 kn) at la pointe de Penmarch and Granville. Waves were measured at 16 m (52 ft) off Ushant and Belle Île.[30]

Similar strength storms in France since 1960:

• Tempête Vivian in 1990 (generally milder)
• Cyclones Lothar and Martin in December 1999, which claimed 140 lives, equally severe in Germany, more southern neighbouring countries also saw multiple deaths.
• Cyclone Klaus which struck worse southern France and northern Spain in 2009 and claimed 26 lives.

The church at Concarneau was damaged but never rebuilt, and was finally demolished a few years later.

'Station closed' notice at Honor Oak Park, 16 October 1987.

The MS Herald of Free Enterprise was caught in the storm off Cape Finisterre as it was making its way for scrapping in Taiwan. The ship was cast adrift after its tow rope parted, finally resuming its journey on 19 October 1987.[31]

The Met Office was severely criticised by most of the national press for failing to forecast the storm correctly.[11]

The Met Office conducted an internal inquiry, scrutinised by two independent assessors, and a number of recommendations were made. Chiefly, observational coverage of the atmosphere over the ocean to the south and west of the UK was improved by increasing the quality and quantity of observations from ships, aircraft, buoys and satellites. Continued refinements were made to the computer models used in forecasting, and changes were made in the training of forecasters. In addition, reforms in the way the Met Office reports warnings of severe weather were implemented, leading to substantially more warnings being issued in the future. Further deployment of improved tracking devices and improvements in the computer model simulations were supported by the purchase of an additional Cray supercomputer. Warnings for the Burns' Day Storm just over two years later were accurate and on time, although the model forecast hinged on observations from two ships in the Atlantic near the developing storm the day before it reached the UK.[38]

Michael Fish's 15 October 1987 forecast on the BBC

BBC meteorologist Michael Fish drew particular criticism for reporting several hours before the storm hit:

Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way; well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't, but having said that, actually, the weather will become very windy, but most of the strong winds, incidentally, will be down over Spain and across into France.[39]

Fish has subsequently claimed that his comments about a hurricane had nothing to do with the UK; they referred to Florida, USA, and were linked to a news story immediately preceding the weather bulletin, but had been so widely repeated out of context that the British public remains convinced that he was referring to the approaching storm. According to Fish, the woman in question was actually a colleague's mother who was about to go on holiday in the Caribbean, and had called regarding Hurricane Floyd to see if it would be safe to travel.[40] This explanation has been discredited however: there was indeed a call from a Mrs Anita Hart, from Pinner, who was about to go on holiday to Wales, and had been warned by her son (a trainee meteorologist) that a hurricane was on its way, and rang the Met Office to check. When challenged on this Fish then claimed that "nobody phoned up" and that she was a "non-existing woman", apparently contradicting his previous declaration, when interviewed about Anita Hart's claims of being the woman who made the call.[41] Fish went on to warn viewers that it would be "very windy" across the south of England, but predicted that the storm would move further south along the English Channel and the British mainland would escape the worst effects. The remainder of his warning has frequently been left out when this forecast has been repeated on television, which only adds to the public's misconception of that day's forecasting. His analysis has been defended by weather experts. In particular, the lack of a weather ship in the Southwest Approaches, due to Met Office cutbacks,[42] meant the only manner of tracking the storm was by using satellite data, as automatic buoys had not been deployed at the time.

Ironically, earlier forecasts as far back as the preceding weekend had correctly identified that gale-force winds would affect Southern England. However, later runs of the model had indicated a more southerly track for the low pressure system, incorrectly indicating that the strongest winds would be confined to Northern and Central France. The French meteorological office used a different computer weather model to the British, and the French model proved more accurate in predicting the severity of the storm in the Channel.

The French meteorological service did correctly predict and warn for the storm and its intensity, but it might have been otherwise. Indeed, the ECMWF model forecast from 14 October 12 UTC failed to predict the strong winds and the storm position (although previous runs were closer to reality), and this could have led to inadequate warnings. This unusual inconsistency of ECMWF could have been a data assimilation issue, or came from poor data. In contrast, the French large scale model EMERAUDE made better predictions, while still underestimating the winds. It is recognized that without the experience of the forecasters, the exceptional aspects of the storm would have been missed.[43]

In the wake of the storm, the Met Office set up the National Severe Weather Warning Service.[10]

It has been said[44] that as 15–16 October 1987 approached, shipping weather forecasts warned of storm movements in the North Atlantic, with the result that ships stayed away from North Atlantic storm tracks, depriving North Atlantic meteorology of a major necessary source of weather report data.

Following the storm, meteorologists at the University of Reading led by Professor Keith Browning developed the sting jet concept. During reanalysis of the storm they identified a mesoscale flow where the most damaging winds were shown to be emanating from the evaporating tip of the hooked cloud head on the southern flank of the cyclone. This cloud, hooked like a scorpion's tail, gives the wind region its name the "sting jet".[14][45]

It is claimed this storm was the worst since the Great Storm of 1703,[10][46][47] which has been challenged as a myth.[4][5] Storms of this strength regularly form over the North Atlantic, where they typically track to the north of Scotland. Storms of such a strength have a return period of 30 to 40 years.[3] The unusual aspect of the storm was that it struck the densely populated southeast of England.[4][5] That winds in the South East had return periods of 1 in 200 years does not mean the winds of this strength occur once every 200 years, but that the winds have a 0.5% probability of happening in a given year.^{[Note 1]}

Following this storm 1.3 million incidents of damage were reported, which is only exceeded by the Gale of January 1976 where destruction covered a wider area of the UK, with 1.5 million incidents of damage reported.[2] The Burns' Day storm hit the United Kingdom in January 1990, less than three years later and with comparable intensity. The Great Storm of 1968 (Hurricane Low Q) had crossed Great Britain between the Pennines and Perthshire with the highest-ever recorded peak wind speeds (134 mph). The 1968 storm, for which no warning was given, devastated agriculture and 5% of forestry in Scotland, toppled shipbuilding cranes on the Clyde, and left almost 2000 people homeless in the Central Belt.

Following the storm, few dealers made it to their desks, and stock market trading was suspended twice; the market closed early at 12:30. The disruption meant the City was unable to respond to the late trading at the beginning of the Wall Street fall-out on Friday 16 October, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average recorded its greatest-ever one-day slide at the time, a fall of 108.36. City traders and investors spent the weekend, 17–18 October, repairing damaged gardens in between trying to guess market reaction and assessing the damage.[48] 19 October, Black Monday, was memorable as being the first business day of the London markets after the Great Storm.

• The storm features in an important scene near the end of Possession: A Romance, the Booker Prize-winning novel by A. S. Byatt.
• The novelist W. G. Sebald recalls the storm towards the end of The Rings of Saturn, as he is visiting Ditchingham Hall in Norfolk, where the storm did great damage to estate trees.
• The BBC drama Our Friends in the North features a character, Eddie Wells MP, dying of a heart attack as the storm hits Westminster.
• The storm and its aftermath acts as the climax to Tim Lott's 2002 novel Rumours of a Hurricane.[49]
• Richard Poole repeatedly mentions the storm in the Death in Paradise episode "A Stormy Occurrence".[50]
• Michael Fish's controversial weather forecast featured in the London 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony,[9] playing on the perceived British love of talking about the weather.
• The BBC drama New Tricks, series 1, episode 1 (aired 1 April 2004) is based on a murder that occurred just before the storm, which had gone unsolved because the storm had "messed up" the evidence.
• The narrator in the novel Max Gate by Damien Wilkins is telling the story, set in 1928, from the vantage point of 1987, in the aftermath of the storm.
• The main character in the 1994 novel by Tim Binding, In the Kingdom of Air, is a BBC meteorologist. The novel takes place during the Great Storm of 1987.[51]
• In a section of Zadie Smith's 2000 novel White Teeth, two of the main characters' houses are destroyed by the storm.
• In the 2019 film Blinded by the Light, the protagonist listens to Bruce Springsteen for the first time during the Great Storm of 1987. Michael Fish's forecast is featured immediately before.