what a hurricane

[roiphil]

how is every one surviving, here we had hurricane darwin, luckily it only took down some large trees around the fields and down the lane, but we had no power for 3 days, and as we are all oil and electric, no heating, or cooking etc so we had the open fire on and torches or candles, the wife taking phones to work to charge, listening to a battery powered radio, other place have done a lot worse.

The daughter lost her stables roof so 5 horses have been temporarily rehomed for now, she still has no power and they reckon it wont be back on that area till the end of the week, she came down yesterday and the first thing the grandson said was grandad get nanny make cup tea 

hope every one else is ok

phil

[ideasguy]

Glad you (and the livestock!) survived that hurricane Phil.
We count ourselves very lucky not to have had any flooding or power cuts in our part of N Ireland.
We are not sure if we an use our open fire after recent renovations, as the plumber disconnected the back boiler from the old heating system. He was a bit vague when we asked the question!

[barryl]

We had very strong winds in East Anglia but no structural damage, no power cuts, no floods. For us we have had a lot of rain but it is the dry side of the country.

We are going to Devon this weekend to visit a son and will pass by the Somerset levels; should be interesting.

[roiphil]

our open fire used to have a back boiler but it was all disconnected when the central heating was installed, in emergencys it would be nice but the down side of  open fire is the place stinks of smoke for days after, yes the wife went crazy with the washing machine after  , our next shop will be for an emergency camping stove just in case for cooking on 

[NightHawk]

Not doing too badly here in the New Forest.

Nowhere near the extent of flooding that other parts of the country are experiencing.  Roads are mostly clear but passable with care, the most badly affected are those running alongside fields where they get the runoff water spilling over.

We've been hit by a lot of high southerly winds since these storms began back in October, but thankfully we've only had damage to wooden panel fencing around our house.

We've had a couple of power outages from trees bringing down power lines, but power has been restored again within a few hours.

As you can imagine, the trees around the New Forest have been badly affected, having the greatest concentration of ancient and veteran trees in western Europe.  According to the National Park Authority they have received an unprecedented number of calls reporting a record number of trees left damaged or felled by the high winds and rain.  Even worse than the storms of 1987 and 1990.
In 1987 most of the deciduous trees were still in leaf when the storm hit, so this time it's less likely of the whole tree going down.  The saturated ground is still weakening the root system of some trees though so that is another factor to be aware of.

All in all, we're battling through this storm system reasonably well.  But we have the greatest sympathy towards the many people who have been flooded out of their homes and having their livelihood affected by it all, and with no sign of any significant improvement to the bad weather yet.