More than 30,000 people dead, thousands of homes flattened, catastrophic widespread flooding, hundreds of sailors drowned, the Eddystone Lighthouse destroyed, the roof blown off Westminster Abbey, no electricity anywhere.
That’s because there was no electricity anywhere. This was the Great Storm of 1703, before electricity had been discovered.
Global warming hadn’t been invented, either, so the week-long hurricane-strength storm was put down to the wrath of God.
Nobody thought to give it a name and there was no Met Office to issue an amber alert and blame it all on alleged man-made climate change.
Since then, the British Isles have been hit by a number of serious ‘weather events’, none of them met with the kind of hysteria which greets even high winds and light drizzle today.
The most notorious of these was probably the 1987 hurricane, forever associated with the BBC‘s weatherman Michael Fish. That wreaked a fair amount of damage but the following day it was pretty much business as usual. I managed to sleep through the worst of it.
I’m in no way trying to diminish the misery Storm Ciaran has caused to many people across the country, who have suffered their homes and businesses being flooded out. But the reaction has been off the charts.
