Memories of the Great Storm of 1987

[January24]

Do you remember it? Where were you?

I always referred to it as a hurricane but apparently it was actually a cyclone.

I was a young teacher in London in a shared house and I thought it was the end of the world! We got a week off from it though. I remember ringing my parents in Wales the day after to say I was fine and not to worry and they laughed as they hadn’t even had a storm where they were!

I was 16 and looking after the house on my own. Parents had gone to Cambridge for the weekend. I was asleep up in the bug attic room and heard the phone ringing so ran downstairs. It was the 'morning after' and my Mum was frantic asking if I was OK etc. I'd slept completely through it.

Woke up to a huge tree fallen into our garden from a big house behind our garden wall. I also remember it being really windy at school and playing out in it? Lifting up our coats and trying to fly! 😅

Weather terms are confusing. A cyclone in the North Atlantic is a low pressure system (hence anticyclone being a high pressure system) . A cyclone in other parts of the world is what we refer to in the Atlantic and the North Pacific as a hurricane. In other oceans they are called cyclones or typhoons.

We can get hurricane force winds here (Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale) but not actual hurricanes like they have in the Caribbean and Florida, as we are too far north and the water is too cool. Hurricanes get their strength from the warmth of the water. However we can have ex Hurricanes that come up from further south e.g. ex Hurricane Ophelia in October 2017.

What I understand the '87 storm was a sting jet off a secondary depression. Meteorology as a science is almost unrecognisable now compared to what it was in 1987, and nowadays we would have far more warning. We still call it a hurricane though!

I landed at Heathrow from Singapore in the tail end of that one. You've never seen so many white knuckles in all your life - not helped by the pilot cheerily announcing that he was now doing some REAL flying - with a hundred people (v empty flight) thinking just land the thing, dude.

I more or less slept through it. I was living in a flat in Earls Court and my room had old sash windows. I sort of woke up in the night and the windows were rattling away really loudly. I just went back to sleep again, making a mental note to do something tomorrow to stop them rattling so much.

Overslept the next day as my radio didn't come on and spent the day in a very empty office.

Was at boarding school and I remember my roommate and I got dressed as normal for the compulsory morning walk.
Walked out of our room and there was chaos all around.
Wonderfully we slept through it 😂

I slept through it. Turned up at the childminder with my toddler the next morning and she said "surely you aren't going into work?". We didn't ever have the radio or TV on in the morning. I walked to work (West London) but was one of very few people in the office!

It can't be a cyclone, cyclones are in the Indian Ocean and actually hurricanes, cyclones and Typhoons are all just names for tropical storms.

In fact because we're not tropical it's not technically a hurricane but we do get storms caused by hurricanes in the Atlantic.

I just remember the 1987 storm being really exciting. But then I didn't have to go out and nothing was damaged. We found someone's hat in our garden and a few neighbours lost roofs off sheds etc, couple of trees down locally. That was about it!

I was up all night writing an essay and noticed how everything went really still before it went wild and I had to wake parents up as skylight was blowing off. I walked about 4 miles to school past all the damaged trees to hand my essay in. North London.

I was seven, I was terrified. My sister slept through it. We got the day off school and went to look at all the fallen trees.

My dad was in Rotary and we had a big charity day replanting trees down in Sevenoaks.

Yes it was my mums birthday ! She sent me to school and had to come and collect me later as the windows all blew in!

I was 10. I slept through it . All I remember is My mum coming in my room. It was all dark. My mum said go back to sleep. The electrics gone. And there being no school .

Wikipedia calls it a ‘violent extratropical cyclone’ with ‘hurricane-force’ winds.

I slept through it in West London and we didn't lose power either, so the first I knew was the news on the radio. Drove to work no problem either, I really didn't appreciate the extent of it till seeing it on the TV.

Yes. Hurricane force wind as a descriptor is anything over 64mph. So we have hurricane force gusts last night, but it wasn't "a hurricane". Hurricanes/cyclones/typhoons form in areas where sea surface temperature is over 26.5 degrees Celsius.

However the name doesn't lessen the scariness or severity of course!

I was about 14/15 and had slept through most of it, as my bedroom was in the lee of the wind. The bus had to take an extended route to school due to so much debris on the roads.

Unfortunately, I had awful period pain that day (with vomiting, passing out, severe abdominal pain, and Mum refused to let the GP give me oral contraceptives in case I ‘became promiscuous’ grr. But I digress).

My Grandma was called to collect me from school due to the wretched pain and on the drive home, via the shortest route, there were many mature trees down in some of the more exposed roads. Teams of blokes with chainsaws working to open main the roads again.

Some of the more winding, out of town roads took days to re-open, and some friends in the more remote (and posher) villages were trapped for a couple of days by fallen trees.

Yes I always call it a hurricane. I remember when we went back to school, all the pupils were talking about the hurricane and we referred to it for years after any time there was a storm!

Yikes @MrsDanversGlidesAgain , I was scared enough running through the streets to get home, can't imagine being on a plane in that! Glad you survived.

Like others I slept through it, struggled to work to find no one else was in. In early '88 I was on a train down to Hastings and saw 1000s and 1000s of fallen trees.

I was living in London and I slept through it! Had no idea how bad it was until I went outside and there were cars and fallen trees everywhere. Tiles off roofs, TV aerials gone.
It’s so different now because we follow things like this on the web and social media, and we have smartphones. I only had a landline phone (which was down).

I remember wrestling an art folder up the hill to school

I was in Lanzarote and flew home a few days later. Will never forget seeing how flattend the land was coming into Gatwick The whole landscape had changed!My parents lived in Sevenoaks and 6 of the 7 Oaks had come down.

I was 12 and slept through it! First I knew was when I looked out the window and saw all the trees down.

Could barely manage to get to sleep last night though. How things have changed as I've grown older over the years 😐

I was camping on Anglesey with my husband, two month old baby DD and our best friends, (another couple).
We had been out to the pub for dinner in the evening. Got back to the camp site and went to bed. It was slightly breezy but we were in a trailer tent so reasonably well protected.
At around 2am we were woken by the gale force winds. The bedroom section of the tent was stable as the beds were on the trailer part. My husband and his mate tried to hold onto and take down the awning part after putting everything from inside it into the car. It was impossible to remove the awning due to the wind and its frame got completely bent out of shape and the canvas torn. DD didn't even wake up. She was fast asleep in her carrycot in the corner of the bedroom. We all just stayed inside the bedrooms area with the zips closely fastened until about 8am in the morning when the wind dropped enough for us to pack up and go home.
Edited to add: as we drove home up the North Wales coast we were shocked to see the static caravans on the seafronts blown over with roofs ripped open like sardine cans.