British people love interesting weather. We don’t get much. Thanks to global warming we might get all sorts of interesting weather soon.
This Thursday was definitely interesting. At work we had four buildings evacuated, a few windows blown out, network failures, and lots of twigs appearing everywhere. Plus rumours and strange stories. Luckily nobody was hurt and everything was managed very well. By Friday morning life was back to normal, apart from the abundance of twigs.
The main impact was on traffic. Railway and tram traffic stopped. Roads jammed to an extent I’ve never seen before - parts of the city centre seemed genuinely gridlocked, with cars tangled up at odd angles or arranged like Tetris blocks. One road was almost entirely filled with stationary empty buses. The pavements had lots more people on them setting off to walk home in groups, or gathered about waiting for people to struggle in to drive them home. I suspect the restaurants and hotels did rather more business than usual, unless they were in one of the taped-off streets.
About ten people died as a result of the storms nationwide, two in Manchester, but it wasn’t a disaster, and wasn’t a crisis, and people didn’t worry much - for most this sort of thing is just something else to grumble about. Most of the news media seemed more interested in an idiot being rude to an actress on TV.
The best description of the windier-than-normal day is from JonnyB’s Secret Diary: Mighty winds shake the Village (a more rural and southern angle). My photos are all of stationary buses but the BBC has some great ones..
