Feb 07 2011
Windy Stronsay
Last Thursday night (3 Feb) the evening ferry was cancelled because of forecasted high winds. It was certainly a a breezy evening and night, gusts of 100 mph on Stronsay and 122 mph recorded on mainland Orkney. The “official” Met Office windspeed at Kirkwall airport was a mere 78 mph. There was some minor damage to fencing on Stronsay and a few houses were without electricity for several hours until the Scottish Hydro engineers came over on the lunch time ferry to fix the problem. One newcomer to the island said he and his wife slept in the lounge as the bedroom (mostly built from wood) was flexing and groaning quite alarmingly; what eventually persuaded them to move into the lounge was watching the panes of glass in the bedroom window actually bowing inwards. Another lady said she spent the night sitting up in bed listening to the roofing timbers groaning under the relentless pressure of the winds. Several folk mentioned that they felt their houses “shaking” under the onslaught of 100 mph winds. However, there was little or no structural damage as most houses on Stronsay are 100+ years old and built to withstand the worst of Orcadian weather. The wind did wake me up at about 3am but I soon went back to sleep.
7 responses so far
I suppose you have to keep telling yourself that the house is 100+ years old! Very scary.
Lucky you, Bruce, managing to sleep through it …!
I think you may have had stronger winds than us here on Lewis, and I slept in a sleeping bag beside Mindy, in the living-room, by the open fire, because of the wind-noise upstairs, which was considerable …!
There is a new couple living close to us who have full-length windows on the front of their two-storey house, and I must ask them how they got on …
Power was off from Thursday night to Friday afternoon, with random short outages before and after …
All livestock well and accounted for though … :- )
Glad you haven’t blown away Bruce. I have faith in those 100 year old buildings too. (The newer ones I’d worry about.) My cats would have been under the bed for the duration of a storm like that.
glad no-one was injured during these gales. re-the windows seeming to blown in,makes me ask this question(i’ve wondered about it ever since moving to france in ‘76″why in G.B dn’t we have shutters on the windows?They keep the heat in during the winter nights and save the windows from violent rain and gales etc.
Glad to see you back up and running Bruce. We have had a few of those storms here, not pleasant. Now it is snow time and with the varied weather these days it seems this winter we are to have regular snow storms on Tuesday/Wednesday. It gets monotonous.
Keep the sagas coming !
As I remember Bruce, from our time working together, you are not one to suffer from wind!
There was a photo of Steve Leigh in the SEN and I wouldn’t have recognized him because, like me, he no longer had any hair. He was only 55 - what a loss of a good man.
I remember watching the dg upvc windows in our then new sunroom in Stromness flexing and bowing in a howling gale; when I mentioned it to the builder, he said they were designed to do that, having previously told me he’d been called out to a house where the conservatory windows had blown in!
The shutters would have to be interior ones I imagine, and would cost a lot of money. Exterior ones would likely take off!