Storm update
The St Jude storm does not seem to have had too much effect in Cumbria - certainly it completely missed Whitehaven - but there has been a significant effect in the South of England.
Tragically a 14 year old boy has been swept out to sea while a 17 year old girl and a man in his fifties were killed by falling trees.
A 99mph gust was recorded at the Isle of Wight and about 270,000 homes are currently without power.
Tragically a 14 year old boy has been swept out to sea while a 17 year old girl and a man in his fifties were killed by falling trees.
A 99mph gust was recorded at the Isle of Wight and about 270,000 homes are currently without power.
Comments
St Jude, known for a couple of things, though the only one that sticks in my mind is the Patron St of lost causes.
Now you can say a storm is a lot of things, but a lost cause? not really, with advance warning you can prepare for it, it takes its toll, and you repair what happened and move on.
no i think St Jude should really be used to watch over the HoC, after all, though i would never blame a government, any government for a weather event, I do remember policy decisions and things that hurt the entire nation when they go so badly wrong. Much as the current, and may i say horrific and tragic, events seen in the south of england were indeed predictable, so were the out comes of the "green policys" so readily adaptable by all political parties.
I have not heard anyone try to blame the government or anyone else for the storm though I'm sure Miliband would try if he thought it would stick.
"storms that battered Britain" - by which they mean the southern part of England.
Then wonder why politcs is losing its power in the North, well when a tax payer funded institute like the BBC can make this sort of lazy journalism.
(ok its a licence, but its still a tax, i have to pay it to watch any live tv channel, and have to buy 12 months worth in 6 months or less
I admit that I did a double take when the BBC said that "everyone has a storm story" and thought, not up here, we don't.
Then I thought that perhaps making a big fuss because the news media have not noticed that we in the North didn't get hit by the storm might not play too well with those who did suffer from it.
But when the supposedly national media pay lots of attention to the squawks from a few NIMBY objectors in the South who don't want modern transport links for the North if those links pass within a mile of their houses, and trivilise the case for modern transport links as a few minutes off the time from London to Birmingham - that's another matter.
And THAT'S whem we need to make a fuss about media neglect of the North.
But the fact is the "storms that battered britain" is clearly not good reporting, the storms that hit the south of england, well that would be ok.
Last time i checked Britain was "all of England, all of Wales, and all of Scotland" like this sort of island we all live on, whilst the Isle of white may well be part of the british isles, it is not part of Britain which is the mainland island.
or goodness sake its not that I am being pedantic about things, its just I expect a lot more from our "national broadcaster"
I repeat, the british isles is not the same thing as the island of britain. The UK is not the same thing either, it even includes Northern Ireland, but does not include the channel islands or the isle of man which are part of the british isles
Indeed there were areas of the channel coast which got off lightly - I was talking today to a colleague in Portsmouth who said that from where he was sitting there appeared to have been an awful lot of media hype about the storm, though he added that the Isle of Wight and local hills give Portsmouth quite a lot of shelter. (Probably one of the reasons it was made the site of Britain's premier naval base.)
Underneath these he wrote the slogan "WE WILL REBUILD"