Battered by winter storms
Sarah Saunderson • Published 5 Jan 2012 13:00
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We may have escaped the biting icy conditions that caused such misery last winter, but this week's weather has shown that winter still has plenty to hurl at us.
The contrast in conditions between this Christmas and last could not have been more striking. In some parts of Fermanagh, the difference in temperature was as much as 25 degrees.
On Christmas Eve night, it was registering -15 degrees in 2010. The same night just over a week ago it was 10 degrees.
While children were disappointed that Christmas card images of snow on the hills failed to emerge this time around, few adults with a memory of last year's hardships were quite as inconsolable.
Last year's difficulties with no water, no heating, no post and no bin collections in some areas are still too fresh for anyone to want to repeat. And so when we enjoyed such a relatively mild Christmas and New Year it was both a talking point and reason for celebration.
But nature showed this week that just when we get complacent, it reminds us that it has the most incredible power to destroy and cause havoc.
The scores on the doors this week were not temperatures but wind speeds. At St Angelo, the Met office statistics showed that at 5am on Tuesday morning gusts up 75 mph were recorded.
A Roads Service employee who was out of his bed and going to the rescue when trees began tumbling down in the early hours was himself struck by falling timber on Tuesday morning. Keith Manley had a very lucky escape. The time of the accident -- just after 5am -- demonstrates how employees like Keith are out in the worst of weather doing vital jobs that many of us are completely unaware of. His colleagues were out and had cut up the tree that hit him very soon after it came down.
So extreme were the strong winds that even one light aircraft at Enniskillen airport went tumbling over.
Trading at Enniskillen's ASDA store ceased for more than 24 hours as engineers made their way to the store to assess the damage and secure the roof after a strip of the metal on the roof came off in the high winds. Winter has not been the big freeze so far but its gusts this week show that it can batter us in many different ways.
This article appeared in Impartial Reporter 05 Jan 12
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