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Will Hurricane Milton be a dud or will it be paradise lost?

PR1Berske said:
Something shifted a few years ago and I can't think how to fix that way of thinking. It's as though cynicism has become a disease of some kind, not just an attitude but a disorder. As you say, they're angry that hurricanes are stronger than before, angry that they're not as strong as predicted, angry that science is constantly examining and re-examining facts on the ground. There is an industry in "proving" that we're being lied to, and it's based on angry base emotions.
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I think the cynicism has been deliberately cultivated. I remember when Ronald Reagan said "The government is not the solution to the problem. The government is the problem." It's all been downhill since Reagan.
 
Would have been about to turn 6 years old at the time of the 1987 October storm. It woke me up during the night, so I helpfully went in to their room to tell my parents there was a storm happening :D

I recall the trees being down on the railway line in to London from Sidcup so not sure if Dad got to work. Trees down in our road including one which fell onto / into a house.

School and nursery was closed for myself / brother. We went for a walk round the local park (Waring Park) and loads of trees down there too. Mum would have been working at the local drama college so perhaps we went there for the day, if I was ever off school during the holidays she used to bring me in and I’d play in the corner of her office (she did something to do with the union I think)
 
Yuwipi Woman said:
I think the cynicism has been deliberately cultivated. I remember when Ronald Reagan said "The government is not the solution to the problem. The government is the problem." It's all been downhill since Reagan.
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Gil Scott-Heron nailed the whole thing. Elect a B-movie actor as president, you turn real life into a B-movie.

 
cupid_stunt said:
In this documentary, the on-duty head of the National Grid explains he had to switch off the electric to London and most of the SE, to prevent the whole grid collapsing, taking the whole country out, which would explain why TV and most radio stations in that area were off air in the morning. There would be back-up generators at main transmitter sites, but most would need engineers to reach them and make the switch over, so TV and national radio in the SE probably came back as the morning went on, there wouldn't have been back-up generators at relay transmitter sites, nor stand alone local radio sites.

At a guess, the Caroline newsreader found Radio 4 on long-wave, as that site is in the the Midlands, well away from the power cuts, plus as it covers most of the UK, it's been considered important in times of national emergencies, so was probably manned 24/7.
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It would certainly have been a messy picture that morning. Usually I cant find all the details that would enable me to do a proper nerdy thing about this, I have to rely on scraps. What I would presume is that a persons particular location and what sort of time in the morning they were on about would have had a very large effect on perceptions of broadcast disruption....

Documentaries and archive footage arent too bad at telling us roughly when the major deliberate grid switch off scenario began, but were not very interested in telling us when it was switched back on again. And then most subsequent reporting deals only with how long the disruption continued for certain areas that had ongoing direct impact as a result of damage to electricity transmission networks serving those areas in particular, rather than the broader regionalal grid switch off. From what little I found, it is possible that even in the south east region beyond London, overall grid might have been back as early as 8am, and for all I know London could have been earlier still. But that doesnt do justice to all the particular sites that would still have been facing power disruption for hours or days after that. My sense of timing is also hampered by what looks like disprovable bullshit on some afternoon and evening national news broadcasts, where a report from the main grid control centre claimed that the first signs of trouble they saw on the network was at 4am, which is clearly at least an hour later than the reality that was described by network operatives years later. Also see this interesting report by someone working at a grid control room in Leeds, and the shit hitting the fan while they were on their post-2.30am break. Also contains interesting detail about what grid control services had to be transferred to Leeds during this event: https://grid-bygones.org/bygonedaysthegreatstormjt.pdf

The most visible disruption to breakfast television broadcasting, via archive footage, involved what studios were operable during this time, rather than total loss. Very makeshift stuff is visible in the earliest TV-am footage. Helpfully, at one point a presenter mentions that the lights went off in London at around 4.20am.



And likewise if you advance two and a half minutes into the following video, you can see the studio circumstances that Nicholas Witchell was reduced to. Had to make use of one of the BBC 'broom cupboard' studios, which becomes even more obvious when someone else who was providing voiceovers for some of the items ends up in view.



By the lunchtime news on the BBC, the start of the BBC South East regional news revealed that they were also being joined by viewers who normally received the BBC South local news, and that this change was due to storm-related problems with the BBC South transmitter:



Anyway, authorities take the availability of continuity broadcasting very seriously, especially at a time like that. I suspect that the dramatic account of the broadcast disruption that you helpfully posted earlier painted a worse picture than that which many people living on land in the region would have experienced, probably due to extremes of location and timing that this source endured, given quite how early in the morning he probably had to go through that routine. Plus of course many people in the regions would have had other signs of what had hit, that were not as readily available to him at that moment, so loss of some tv and radio wouldnt have been the primary indicator for a lot of other people. People who had electricity back by the time of their breakfast routine were more likely to have experienced varying degrees of degraded broadcast service rather than a total absence of service.
 
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elbows said:
Also see this interesting report by someone working at a grid control room in Leeds, and the shit hitting the fan while they were on their post-2.30am break. Also contains interesting detail about what grid control services had to be transferred to Leeds during this event: https://grid-bygones.org/bygonedaysthegreatstormjt.pdf
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Oh I just noticed that the person who wrote that also mentions:

Some months later the CEGB made a documentary ‘Riding the Hurricane’ which powerfully portrays the events of that night.
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I hadnt heard of it before. I am going to watch it now:

(CEGB = Central Electricity Generating Board)



edit - having now watched it, it fills in some timing gaps during the period when things were declining, and confirms others, but lacks handy timestamps for some key phases of recovery, preferring to do some positive classic information film propaganda for the later period instead. The shit hitting the fan timestamps are pretty consistent with other sources, and my complaint about the evening news claim about 4am being the first sign of trouble is upheld - 3.55am-4am was the start of the very peak of the shit hitting the fan, with peak woe for London at 4.25am, not the first signs of trouble as far as grid control operates were concerned.
 
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When I was a kid, I saw a tornado up close. I mark it as one of the most awe-inspiring things I've seen. It came up out of the clear sky in the afternoon and formed quickly. When the siren sounded, my family headed for the basement. It had been so nice that the backdoor was open, and you could see clearly out the screen door. About 50 yards away a tornado was tearing a massive tree out, by unscrewing it from the ground. My memory has it in slow motion, but I'm sure it wasn't. You could only hear the roar of the storm, but I know my father was yelling at us to get the fuck downstairs. We all stopped stunned in our tracks and watched for a second. Then, my father pushed us downstairs. Luckily, it only damaged the tree and the chicken house it landed on.
 
cupid_stunt said:
Yep, 6 of the famous ancient oaks were toppled, it was said Sevenoaks should be renamed Oneoak.

I remember the Kent Messenger newspaper group publishing a book of photos, the scenes were mind boggling, I remember this one of just loads of fallen trees, and the only clue that it was actually a main A-road was a some road signs sticking out amongst the trees.

I grow up in my teens between Oxted in Surrey, and Edenbridge in Kent, 90%+ of trees in that area were taken out. In the video below there's a piece on a couple heading off from Edenbridge on the 45 minute drive to Pembury Hospital, as the wife had gone into labour, they never got there, they were trapped by trees falling both in front and behind their car, it took them about two hours to walk back home, with her in labour! :eek:



In this documentary, the on-duty head of the National Grid explains he had to switch off the electric to London and most of the SE, to prevent the whole grid collapsing, taking the whole country out, which would explain why TV and most radio stations in that area were off air in the morning. There would be back-up generators at main transmitter sites, but most would need engineers to reach them and make the switch over, so TV and national radio in the SE probably came back as the morning went on, there wouldn't have been back-up generators at relay transmitter sites, nor stand alone local radio sites.

At a guess, the Caroline newsreader found Radio 4 on long-wave, as that site is in the the Midlands, well away from the power cuts, plus as it covers most of the UK, it's been considered important in times of national emergencies, so was probably manned 24/7.

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If the Radio Four Today Programme and or the Archers goes of air. The chaps in charge of the Trident submarines are expected to press the Doomsday button, according to some spookwatchers.

Fortunately, this is probably not true.
 
SpookyFrank said:
It's not true at all. It's the Shipping Forecast, not the Archers. Longwave init.
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And, that's bollocks, as if a LW transmitter breakdown could ever result in the UK starting a nuclear war, is frankly bonkers.

Which is handy, considering the Radio 4's LW transmitter is due to be finally closed down next year.
 
cupid_stunt said:
And, that's bollocks, as if a LW transmitter breakdown could ever result in the UK starting a nuclear war, is frankly bonkers.

Which is handy, considering the Radio 4's LW transmitter is due to be finally closed down next year.
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In any case, when it came to comms with Trident-equipped subs, there were specific sites and transmitters that used VLF (very low frequency) for just that purpose, at Rugby and Criggion. I saw the Rugby setup a few times when being driven past as a child, and it was quite an impressive setup. I think it was eventually relegated to providing VLF signals that could provide the time to radio alarm clocks in its later years, before finally being demolished. VLF waves were handy for sub comms as they could penetrate seawater.

In regards the other rumours, there is possibly a slight basis in fact to them, but even then somewhat misconstrued. See the wikipedia entry for letters of last resort, which does mention one source for the radio 4 thing, in the era of vanguard subs. So the checking for the existence of things like radio 4 might possibly have been one of the means by which submarines could attempt to establish whether the UK government was still functioning. Descriptions of the protocol vary over time, perhaps relying instead on length of time since successful military comms were heard. And at most it wouldnt have been used in isolation, it was only one of the checks, and youd only need to resort to such check if there were already other suspicious signs that things had blown up. And even then, if such conditions were met then it just meant the envelopes would be open and read. There has been some reporting of what sort of option a Prime Minister can include in such letters, eg:

The Guardian reported in 2016 that the options are said to include: "Put yourself under the command of the United States, if it is still there", "Go to Australia", "Retaliate", or "Use your own judgement".[4] The actual option chosen remains known only to the writer of the letter.
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en.wikipedia.org

Letters of last resort - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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frogwoman said:
Atlantic 7-Day Graphical Tropical Weather Outlook Nooooo :(
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Well its still hurricane season so its perfectly normal to still expect to see such systems forming, and such forecasting as a result. Granted the way the sea temperatures are setup this year does mean that the direction of some of these have ended up being not so normal for this stage of the hurricane season, eg we might expect systems that form in the area of this latest one to go in a less impactful direction at this time of year than is currently indicated in that forecast. But personally I wont pay a lot of attention to it until detail about strength etc firms up considerably.
 
elbows said:
Well its still hurricane season so its perfectly normal to still expect to see such systems forming, and such forecasting as a result. Granted the way the sea temperatures are setup this year does mean that the direction of some of these have ended up being not so normal for this stage of the hurricane season, eg we might expect systems that form in the area of this latest one to go in a less impactful direction at this time of year than is currently indicated in that forecast. But personally I wont pay a lot of attention to it until detail about strength etc firms up considerably.
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Well it says it might just be a tropical depression and not end up as a hurricane.
 
frogwoman said:
Well it says it might just be a tropical depression and not end up as a hurricane.
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Yeah, hence my final comment about strength. If I got stressed about every depression that formed then that would be pretty intolerable, I have to wait until certain conditions are met before ratcheting up my attention and my concern for people in various places.
 
With the number of Americans making claims that the recent hurricanes were controlled by weather devices, you have to wonder what they're putting in the water over there.

Oh shit, and now I've started another conspiracy theory.
 
gosub said:
With the number of Americans making claims that the recent hurricanes were controlled by weather devices, you have to wonder what they're putting in the water over there.

Oh shit, and now I've started another conspiracy theory.
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Flouride
 
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