Napoleonic & ECW wargaming, with a load of old Hooptedoodle on this & that


Wednesday 1 December 2021

Hooptedoodle #413 - Storm Arwen, South East Scotland

 A Survivor's Tale

 

We were hit by the first named storm of the Winter last Friday night. My house hasn't been damaged, as far as I know, and we have no-one hurt here, but the farm has been badly affected - lots of trees down, a couple of buildings at the stables were blown over, and there are roofs off the big steading buildings along the lane at Auldhame. Electric power went off at 18:18, and came back on at about 21:30, but it appeared to have been restored only as an emergency service, on reduced voltage, which meant that we could boil a kettle very slowly, that traditional filament-type electric lights worked very dimly, modern energy-saving and LED bulbs didn't work at all, and that was about it. Microwave and most other things were not working, and our central heating was not interested at all at these voltages, so I lugged in some baskets of logs from the woodshed, to keep our stove going.

 

The phone service at Scottish Power, our electricity supplier, had been tweaked so that you could not speak to anyone (so you couldn't report anything, for example...) and gave pre-recorded messages which were heavy on heroism, and what a terrible time they were having, but said little that was useful or reliable.

 

Another thing which would not work at the low voltage was broadband, so the electricity company's advice to keep an eye on their website was especially irritating. Amazingly, I could get some kind of data service on my iPhone, but it came and went. By timing the boiling of a kettle, I estimated we must have been operating at something like 40% of the normal 240v.

 

We kept hearing in the recorded messages that Scottish Power's linesmen were making fantastic progress, and we were led to believe that everything would be restored by 8pm Saturday. The lads from the farm got the roads clear by Saturday night, so things were looking up. Then, Sunday morning, Tommy the Farmer appeared on my doorstep with a chainsaw (which was alarming) and announced that he had found a cable down "at the back of the Walled Garden", and if I was in touch with the supplier could I report it. I spent a few hours trying every known phone number, and just got the same recorded messages. However, one of the more obscure numbers gave the opportunity to leave a phone number of my own, so that someone could call me back. Eventually, about 2pm Sunday, a girl from Scottish Power's customer desk (which is in Birkenhead!) rang me, and I reported the break we'd found, of which they had no previous note. We were at least in the system now.

 

Monday morning some SP vans arrived and assessors looked at the damage, and promised that the linesmen would come to sort us out. I had to go into Edinburgh for an appointment that took up most of the day, and when I came home I found that the linesmen had, in fact, shown up, but for safety reasons had shut off the power completely, and would return as soon as possible to make a proper repair. Thus we were now completely in the dark, and even the kettle was no longer available. I understand about the need for safety, but this didn't really feel like progress.

 

About midday Tuesday the vans came back, and the boys got us reconnected at 16:10, disappearing immediately to get on with their backlog. I started going round the house, checking things, and everything seemed to be working except our central heating boiler, which is stubbornly showing a "C1" error code which suggests that, once again, the power cut has broken the fan. This happens occasionally - a problem of our set up here is that the service automatically attempts to reconnect in the event of a line fault, so that the electricity goes off in a series of flashes and stutters. It's the stuttering that does the damage.

 

Thinking we had maybe got off light, compared with the tales of disaster up and down the country, I phoned Worcester-Bosch and arranged for an engineer to come and sort us out on Thursday, and I was still speaking to their call centre when our electricity dropped out again!

 

I regret to say that I may have sworn when the place blacked out while I was still speaking to the very helpful young lady at WB, for which I apologised. She took it in good spirit - she said she spends her life speaking to people whose heating has broken down, so she isn't bothered!

 

Power was finally fixed permanently at 21:50 tonight, by which time I had gone to bed to listen to the Leeds game on my battery radio. OK - I got up, checked things were in order, proved that the boiler was still knackered, set the dishwasher going, tidied up a bit, etc etc... and I made myself a cup of coffee - first for a few days.

 

We just have to grit our teeth until Thursday. We can use electric radiators to keep the place habitable, the cooker works again, as does the microwave, we have light and TV and broadband. My wife plans to go to her gym each morning for a swim and to get a shower, and I'll use our electric shower upstairs, which is vastly inferior to the posh one downstairs but is good enough for me!

 

This afternoon I received a personal call from SP, asking were we all right and offering a £10 voucher for a hot meal. I'm proud to say I managed not to swear at that lady. I thanked her for the offer, in the spirit in which it is made, but pointed out that since we are going to have to write off some £150-worth of frozen and refrigerated food, and have had our lives put on hold for 4 days, the voucher is a little insulting if that's the extent of goodwill. I suggested that SP might put the £10 towards equipping a new telephone service which will allow customers to report problems.

 

I know there has been a lot of horrific damage elsewhere, and people have been injured and stranded, so it's important not to dramatise what's happened here. I am told that this is only the 6th time in recorded history that a red weather warning has been issued for East Lothian. They will have my full attention in future, I promise.

 

The farm has lost about 40 or 50 adult trees within about 200 yards of my house, some very big ones, and it will take a long while to get everything back to normal, but it could have been a lot worse. It is sobering that I didn't hear any trees coming down - couldn't hear anything for the noise of the wind. What infuriates me is that, if Tommy the Farmer had not found the broken cable on Sunday, then we would have continued to appear as a tick on some regional chart on SP's wall. As far as they were concerned, we were part of an area that had been sorted out, and they had fixed the phone system so that we were unable to contact them to correct that situation.

 

All the best to everyone affected by the bad weather.  Here are some photos - gratuitous violence:

 

 
At least we can get out - Saturday morning, the lads have cleared the lanes







 
Some of the damage at the Stables - the building right centre shifted about 20 feet and lost its roof, which blew into the hedge on the left




 

 
The cable which Tommy found - it is one of the 3 which bring the 3-phase supply to our hamlet - a spur from the main overhead feed. Behind you see the back wall of the "Walled Garden", which was built some time in the 1700s

 

 
It goes on to a transformer, and it was the power feeding back through this that gave us our accidental "reduced" service for a couple of days
 
An aerial photo of the area from a few years ago; on the left of the picture you can see the D-shaped Walled Garden, which once was a market garden with greenhouses, but is now pasture for the horses. This D-shaped field can be identified on Roy's military map of Scotland, 1747-55. The back wall is the one near us, close to the woods, and the cable is on this side of the wall. The tree which caused the extra damage is dark green, on the left edge of the photo. The place certainly doesn't look like this now, after the trees were flattened. The photo is facing almost due North

 



 
2 into 3 gives you about 100v, apparently...

 
Here's a view of the dark green tree from the aerial shot - not much of it left by Monday - Tommy has sawn up a lot of it to clear the gate


                                                                    Erm - sorry - not today it isn't...

 
More wrecked trees - all lined up, knocked down from the North East...








25 comments:

  1. Seemed to be a hell of a storm...the images on the BBC that struck me were of a forest that looked like it had been felled by a nuclear explosion , and a Police Scotland vehicle in Grampian somewhere that had been crushed by an enormous falling tree...fortunately the officers were out of it at the time although sadly the reason they were in the area was a guy had been killed by a similar large tree falling on his vehicle while he was in it.

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    1. Yes - Britain is normally pretty temperate, as world disasters go, so we are not very good at this stuff. The trees all pointing the same way did remind me of photos of Tunguska, though on a trivial scale in comparison. I saw a press clip of some chap struggling with an umbrella on a promenade somewhere - this is an excellent example of not being good at this stuff. Darwin could have plucked that chap up and dropped him in the sea somewhere, to strengthen the species. Our local news websites were full of customer pictures of their dog's kennel having blown over, or damage to the village's Xmas decorations, but in Aberdeenshire and in Yorkshire it was a different matter altogether!

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  2. Glad to hear you are coping Tony. Here in Norfolk it is very cold, but we have been fortunate to miss out on the worst of the storm. That said, I might just get in another packet of candles and several extra boxes of matches...all very well having a wood-burner and a garage-full of seasoned wood, but I'd look a bit of a clown if I found I had no matches in the house...

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    1. I had a match-counting session here on Saturday. The things we have now run out are proper kindling and I find we have no candlesticks for traditional-size candles! Better get some in.

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  3. Sorry to hear of your troubles, my daughter in Weardale is still waiting for the power to be restored. The mobile phone mast was only repaired yesterday. The problems seem pretty widespread, even down here is Cheshire the next village lost power through to Monday night.

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    1. It's scary - not just the force of the storm but our unpreparedness. Our power company are far more worried about being blamed for a live cable than about the safety of their outlying customers. One of teh linesmen here yesterday told me that for legal reasons they had had to switch off the power to a village in Berwickshire - possibly Abbey St Bathans - although there was an old fellow dying in one of the cottages. Very upsetting all round.

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  4. Glad to hear that you are safe and well…
    Mother Nature certainly knows how to show you who is boss…

    One of the first jobs I had when I worked for the Forestry Commission was redrawing planting maps from woods and forests that had been hit by a previous years winter storms… there was a lot to do… when I left a couple of years later for the heady highlife of the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries they were still being worked on…
    Let’s hope you don’t have to wait that long for your boiler 😳

    All the best. Aly

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    1. As you say, Mother N does not muck about. I have always considered that I live next to woodland, but a couple more of these and I'll be living near to a few trees, and without the woods the houses here will take the full blast from the North-Easters!

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  5. Blimey, what an ordeal, glad things are getting back to normal now. The ability of utility providers to cut themselves off from all customer contact is deeply annoying. Down here all we've had is snow and some big trees down, but Northern Power grid has decided it is a good idea to bombard me with emails and texts about how hard they are working to fix things.

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    1. We were very lucky compared with other areas, I have no doubt. The linesmen and the crews out in the Land Rovers here and down in the Borders and elsewhere are real heroes - I don't really have the words to express my admiration and appreciation. As for the power company's marketing people, communications set-up and legal department, they should send them all out in the Land Rovers to get a taste of what they are dealing with. And give each of them a voucher for a hot meal and a new pair of Wellies.

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  6. Glad to hear that eventually you’re ok! It was a pretty nightmarish night and I feel very sorry for the farmer, I got off light losing about 80’ of fencing although I did have a Wizard of Ozz moment when I went into the shed to try and get some rope etc in the hopeless attempt at saving said fence and the shed began to lift! Anyway shed survived so the weekend - weather permitting will be spent rebuilding fence, concrete posts etc. Likewise a red warning in the future will be treat with respect and some precautions taken

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    1. Likewise, very glad you are OK - 80' of fence is serious stuff - hope it didn't travel too far! As for lifting sheds, one of the timber stables buildings here seems to have rolled across a lane and disappeared in bits into the wood opposite. No horses injured, fortunately.

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  7. Well I’m glad that you are okay. I’m not really a people person but I did think of you when the storm hit us here in west wales. It was nasty weather but I knew from the news that it was a damn sight worse up there where you are. I suspect these storms are going to happen more and more often - and with greater severity. Once in a decade freak events may become routine yearly ones. We had no electricity interruptions but I did recall with fondness us having a generator of our own in France. Maybe you should think of getting one?

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    1. I think that, like our propane emergency camping stove, a generator here would rust into the ground through lack of use, but it's a good idea. Though it seems counter-intuitive, we should probably make a habit of shutting down our heating when a storm warning comes. The auto reconnect helps to keep up Scottish Power's service percentages, but it's the off-on sequence which does the most damage to equipment. I think this will be our 4th boiler fan bust by power failures over the last 15 years.

      As for Scottish Power, I'd like to have a chat with the heroes who write the weepie recorded messages about the magnificence of their own staff. In two days, in this area, they improved the situation from 150,000 homes without power to 3,500, but it was presented as a performance metric - those of us who were consigned to the 3,500 were not really mentioned!

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  8. As someone who has lived through several Hurricanes and one or two mid winter Snowmaggeddon affairs, you have my complete sympathy and empathy. My wife is now leader of the one person household emergency readiness committee which is vigilant that we are always equipped to be comfortable for a minimum of a week without power or access to roads regardless of season. Luckily out house predates electricity so its ok with it.

    Glad you've survived. Alas the changes to your surroundings will take longer to normalize.

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    1. Hi Ross - I understand we have to be careful what we accidentally wish for, but in a sense our troubles with extreme weather here are a lot to do with lack of practice. Being right next to the sea, we very rarely get snow - if we get severe snow, which might be once in five years, we think we have a snow shovel somewhere, and we think it might be in the shed. We bought an emergency stove many years ago, and it's never been used - usually we forgot we have it, a couple of times we remembered but couldn't be bothered digging it out, and recently we are nervous that the gas cylinders won't work any more.

      We should have stuff written down, and we should know what we have, where it is and when it needs to be replaced. Lifeboat drill.

      Anyway, your wife's role sounds right on the money!

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  9. Glad that you are almost through it all now Tony. When I saw the 'red' swathe on the weather map on Friday I did wonder how you would fare - it was bad enough being in the 'amber' area. I actually went out to the Hinton Hut in the evening to do some painting but after an hour or so I had a slight concern that I and it might get swept up like Dorothy's House so I retreated to the house.

    In the morning when I peered out I could see that at least 20% of the roof shingles had disappeared from the hut roof. Further inspection revealed no lasting damage to the structure thankfully.

    If this was the first storm of the season heaven help us by the time we get to storm Zebedee!

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    1. I hope you found the missing roof shingles? Maybe stronger fixings would be an idea?

      I was a bit worried about this being the first storm of the season, but apparently we are not necessarily required to have 26! - on the other hand, if necessary, they can start the alphabet again if they run out of letters. Not sure I like the sound of this.

      I've got to do a lot of clearing away upstairs - the intention is that the visiting Bosch engineer tomorrow will also carry out our annual boiler service, which was scheduled for January, so I have to clear a pile of stuff out of one of the wardrobes so that he can get access to inspect the flue in the roof space.

      No-one said this was going to be easy. This evening I hope to get some time to select some ECW soldiers for an upcoming game - Boldon Hill, a scenario I've used before - my guest general will be a friend who has done some boardgaming but never miniatures stuff; fortunately we'll be using C&C, so he should be well comfortable with that!

      Take care - if those shingles come down out of the sky you'd better have your helmet on.

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  10. This, and the responses, sound all rather terrifying but I'm very pleased that you all came through safe and sound. I'll keep my fingers crossed for the rest of the season. The main worry downthis end is earthquakes!

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    1. Central heating engineer is here as I write this, fixing the boiler - he says that all down the coast here there are boilers with blown fans, same as mine, and it's because they've been exposed to low voltage in the aftermath of Storm Arwen. The weather was bad, certainly, but the problems we are seeing are only partly related directly to the severity of the wind - poor maintenance and lack of procedures are a big part of it. I would write another rant on the subject, but even I don't have the stomach for it, so maybe I'll write a rant about something else!

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  11. Blimey, Tony, that's proper carnage of the trees. Glad you came out of it unscathed, if a bit cold and suffering from lack of caffeine. Old Ma Nature is always ready to show us who is boss, isn't she?

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    1. No questions who's running this experiment, absolutely. One of my neighbours said something about a religious experience, which normally I would nod away as a figure of speech, but I sort of know what he means.

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    2. Indeed, you have been neglecting the regular sacrifices to the Green Man, or Gaia, or whichever appears safest to appease.

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  12. Pleased to hear that you were relatively unscathed and got through it eventually. We are so super dependent on electricity aren't we? We had our power out for a week in early 2011 after a mega storm went from north to south down our wheatbelt, collecting dust along the way (it followed our driest year on record, beating 1914). We were better served by our electricity mob though. Ten quid does sound just a little tokenistic. Went a bit further towards covering the freezer-full of food, most of which became for the dogs.
    Regards, James

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    1. Hi James - it is only a short while ago, but it's amazing how the details fade. Someone apparently had majo second thoughst about the £10 meal voucher, since we are now being offered full compensation for the outage - I have been verbally assured this will reach us "by mid-January", which in itself is well outside the statutory period and liable to score an additional amount, but there is mention of an extra bonus compensation payment. In any case, presumably the power company will recoup the cost by putting up our prices!

      I've put together a written timeline and details of phone calls (including failed ones) so that I am ready for the dispute and the arse-dragging which starts in January.

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