Piers Corbyn still getting it wrong

We certainly had rain and strong winds on Sunday morning but, as explained in a recent post, the full force of the storm was never going to be felt in my part of the village because of the combination of wind direction and local topography. However one or two places in the peninsula did see a maximum gust of 75 mph.

A couple of weather related incidents in Devon that occurred on that day are worth recording. A young lad from Barbrook in North Devon fell into the swollen West Lyn River where it tumbles down on its final mile to Lynmouth. His father just wearing coat and pyjamas rushed to the scene and waded into the river; such was the force of the current they were both carried several hundred yards downstream until the son was able to grab hold of a rock. It was about an hour before a rescue could be completed and miraculously they both survived.

Further south in the county a lady living at Starcross on the west side of the Exe estuary was the recipient of a small tornado. The whirlwind picked up a trampoline that normally would take several people to lift and waltzed it down to the end of the road bumping in to several cars on its journey! Happily there were no injuries as a result of that event. It's a fact as I understand it that this country is very prone to tornado formation but usually they don't become newsworthy items.

From the foregoing it can be seen that it had been a blustery few hours and in fact had been well forecast by the met office for a few days. Windy though it was it certainly wasn't remarkable in the sense that a storm of that magnitude could be expected any year.

Now Piers Corbyn who insists that such weather is driven by sunspots and other solar activity and has nothing to do with 'Global Warming' reckons to have predicted this storm for a long time. He had gone public on this but his prediction was that it would be between November 24 and 28 and that we should expect gusts from 90 to 100mph! In other words comparable with the nighttime storm of 1987 (the Michael Fish Hurricane) or the daytime storm of January 1990 when for a time all of Cornwall lost its power from the National Grid. Shortly before last Sunday's gales he had come out with some reason I didn't really comprehend as to why this weather event had slowed down and was a few days late in arriving. So concerned had he been about the strength of the impending storm that he had been flashing warnings to the government about it. A personal thing but I find the way he words his press releases very irritating.

Piers Corbyn certainly polarises opinion; I would say that his detractors feel happier at the moment than his disciples.