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The UK has been swept by quite a few storms recently, many areas in the North of England and Scotland have been without power for many days and weeks as high winds have brought down power lines. Until this last weekend however there hasn’t been much to speak of in my part of the Country, but now we’ve had Storm Eunice.

In my fifty I can remember many storms, some with silly names and many more that were just storms. The ones that stick in my mind though were in 1987 and 1990.

The hurricane of 1987 (it technically wasn’t a hurricane, but that names sells more newspapers and books) was a proper storm. Fortunately it arrived in the middle of the night which probably saved many lives, even though 18 people were killed. I would have been 15, and I was woken in the night by the howling winds and sounds of things being thrown around, breaking and general mayhem outside. The power was off and it was difficult to see what was going on outside so I did what any 15 year old would do, I went back to bed. I lay awake listening to the sounds of breaking glass (the greenhouse in our garden being dismantled by the wind) as the mayhem continued, and ultimately went back to sleep.

In the morning I woke as usual and went about the usual routine before heading off to school. I said goodbye to my Dad (my Mum was working nights at the time and unsurprisingly hadn’t made it home yet), so he was seeing me off to school before going to work (he couldn’t actually get to work, so eventually they came and got him). He worked for BT and was about to have a very busy number of weeks.

I walked out of the house and to the end of the drive and started to realise just how bad things were. Looking in one direction I realised that the school bus was going to have to find an alternative route as a tree was down across the road. Then turning to walk to the bus stop realised that there probably wasn’t going to be a school bus that day as there were another two or three trees down in the opposite direction as well. No school bus, no school.

Looking back, those trees were much older than I am now and probably than I will ever live to be. Trees hundreds of years old wiped out in one night.

The storm of 1990 hit in the middle of the day, and as a result more people lost their lives. I was at college at the time studying A-levels. By early afternoon we were told that lectures were cancelled for the rest of the day and we were to go home. For me this meant trying to get a train home. I tried walking to the station from college but it was virtually impossible to walk upright and in anything resembling a straight line. The wind would push you over or just as you were making progress by leaning into it at 45° would cut to nothing so that you would fall flat on your face.

Of course when I did eventually get to the station there were no trains, nothing was running on time. A train did come along after a couple of hours and we were all advised to get on it. It was going to the end of the line or as far as they could get if they found the line blocked, and stopping at every station along the way. We’d made it about halfway to where I needed to get to when the train stopped. Eventually a guard appeared and told everyone to sit on one side of the train as there was a tree partially blocking the track but the driver thought he could push through it. Sitting on the other side of the carriage meant that if any windows broke, hopefully nobody would be covered in glass. [A couple of thoughts here. This is before trains had recorded announcements, so the guard literally had to walk the length of the train and say the same thing in each carriage. Secondly these trains were already pretty beaten up and had been in service for a long time, they would ultimately stay in service for many more years, but it’s clear that the driver wasn’t bothered and probably those old trains were better built and more able to stand up to a bit of tree pushing than anything we have now].

We managed to push through the tree, no windows were broken, but a branch did manage to unlatch one of the doors and we carried on to the next station with the door open until someone was able to shut it when the train stopped moving. We made it to where I in theory had to change trains, only that was as far as I was going to get on a train that day. The winds were starting to ease and I made the rest of the journey home uneventfully on foot.

So how does Storm Eunice compare? Well it (I’m sorry I know the storm has a female name, but I can’t refer to it as ‘she’), started for me at least as an Amber wind warning and then rose to a Red. We never had pretty colours to describe the wind back in the 80’s and 90’s. I appreciate weather forecasts have never been an exact science and I think we got off pretty lightly.

Through the red phase we had a few strong gusts, no real damage that I’ve seen locally – a few fence panels down and an odd branch and the power stayed on throughout. I haven’t yet seen anything significant locally close to what has been reported elsewhere.

The yellow wind warnings that followed over the weekend and is still in force as I type this has been much worse. We’ve had a much more consistent high wind speed with higher gusts and it’s been going on for much longer. Hopefully it will be slackening off in the next few hours.

I think we’ve been lucky though, a few miles to the South wind speeds of 122 mph have been recorded and sadly people have lost their lives. Eunice appears to have skirted us without any real drama and certainly nothing approaching the 1987 or 1990 events, although there has been some comparison to those storms. I’m not complaining, I’m glad that we are safe.