During these past two weeks, the UK has faced harsh weather and storms: Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis. Wind, snow and rain warnings, issued by the Met Office, accompanied both Storm Ciara and Storm Dennis.
Storm Ciara, characterised by its powerful, hurricane-force winds of more than 90mph, began to affect London on Saturday, 8th February 2020 and resulted in multiple consequences, some being: flooding in some areas, power cuts, and disruption throughout airports and some roads. This brutal wind resulted in a tree collapsing at Gumley House School and was met with surprise by students and staff who entered the school the following Monday.
Although the strong winds of Storm Ciara helped a British Airways flight from New York to London reach its fastest record flight time of just under 5 hours (instead of its average flight time of around 6 hours 13 minutes), undoubtedly, these storms ultimately cause havoc and chaos. At Heathrow Airport multiple flights were delayed or cancelled altogether which meant that some passengers were left waiting for longer in the airport than they should have been due to the danger to travel posed by this storm. This also meant restaurants and shops within the airport were much busier than normal. A worker at Huxleys- an English restaurant at Heathrow Airport- described how during Storm Ciara, “Some customers stayed longer than usual because of the storm affecting and disrupting their travel plans." Storm Ciara's wind intensity could be seen with some of the hazardous plane landings which have been captured and uploaded on YouTube.
Following Storm Ciara was Storm Dennis the following weekend of 15th February 2020 which once again brought the notorious strong winds and extremely heavy rain.
These storms, mainly Storm Ciara, has been declared to be the one of the biggest storms since 1987 when the Great Storm of 1987 had winds of over 80mph and 22 casualties.
-Amber Silva
