Wow!

[davidgillon]

Catching up on the local news after my post about Storm Eunice, I found out that the wind, which reached 70mph locally (which equates to Violent Storm on the Beaufort scale, and just short of Hurricane force) had shut down the port of Dover, plus all train services in Kent, which would have been a distinct bugger if you'd made it into London in the morning! And more spectacularly that the middle chimney of three at Grain Power Station, which is about five miles from me, had blown down, forcing the 1.2GW power station to shut down. Fortunately this is the new gas-fired station, with much shorter chimneys than the 801ft tall one at the old oil-fired station, which, until it was blown up in 2016 was the second highest chimney in the UK. (Though it seems like at least half the local and national press thinks it was the 801ft one).

I didn't get out yesterday (it was chucking it down with rain), but did take the car out for a run at lunchtime today (it hadn't been out in it in 10 days) to get it in before the next storm, which it turns out has shifted its track north since I last checked, and picked up a name, so Storm Franklin is now due to hit Northern Ireland later, rather than us this afternoon.

I basically did a Vee, up the road to the airfield, down the other side to Rochester and back, just far enough to put a bit of charge on the battery. I noticed a couple of trees missing on the road on the way up, one with a six-eight inch trunk snapped off a couple of feet above ground level and a smaller one, two to three inches, that had been chainsawed off at about the four feet mark - presumably it had been sticking into the road.

Coming down the backside of the airfield the road is on the edge of a valley, with a small patch of woodland along the exposed edge.and I had to dodge into the middle of the road half a dozen times because of trees down in the woods that were just projecting into the road - it was as if someone had planted a bush in the gutter.

But it was on the way back, coming down the Chatham side of the airfield that made me go "Whoa!!!". While it's by the airfield there are big retail units (PC World, Homebase etc - so warehouse size) separating the road from the airfield, so it isn't totally exposed. But in a half mile stretch of road I passed three single-pole traffic signs that had been snapped off at  the base, and two double-pole signs that had been bent back at 45 degrees. Wow!

And looking out of the window while talking to my mother on the phone after I got back, I spotted that the three old fence-posts I have dug in at 45 degrees as safety props against one of the fence panels at the bottom of the garden (as it once flexed so much in a gale it popped out of the vertical posts) had all been knocked sideways. I've been out and kicked them back into place, but the ground is sodden, so if Storm Franklin has decided to give us a miss then that's probably just as well.