Storm Ciaran, walking to school.

[JIGNAJAY]

Anyone else wondered if it'll be safe to walk to and from school tomorrow with weather warnings in place? We have a 20ish min walk and I don't have a car. Considering booking a taxi but am counting every penny. Or am I being ott and walk will likely be fine? Already very windy here.

Sum up everything wrong with people these days. Its not like its a bloody hurricane or tropical storm.

Ignore the above poster! Avoid trees if you can. I will be walking too and going slightly longer way around that is more open.

Hm, some areas are an amber warning aren’t they? Are you in one of those?

Yes Amber.

The warning says ‘danger to life from flying debris’. If you’re in the Brighton zone then it looks worse in the afternoon. I don’t know what that means though (for what you should do).
Maybe see how it looks in the morning.
Maybe your school will close in the meantime.

Maybe play it by ear?
These storms can be vicious

I am in West Sussex, and waiting to hear if schools will close.

I don't think that caution is OTT at all!

We're also in West Sussex and waiting to see if they close. We're not near the coast, though.

We are all on half term up here but I would play it by ear.

Are you always this rude? www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/67274353#

I'd chance it. It's usually not as bad as people expect. There will probably be a few injured or killed but statistically it's overwhelmingly safe.

There was literally a tornado in Sussex at the weekend; a flash flood did for the drains in my town on Monday and washed out the pavements at school run o’clock, and the storm hasn’t even landed yet. There’s an Amber warning for a reason.

You can't blame people though can you? We're inundated with the warnings now, back in the day it was just 'weather'. It's hard to know now when to treat it as just 'weather' and when to take extra precautions. It's completely understandable that people get a bit frazzled with it all!

Amber alert is use common sense and stay alert and be prepared to change plans / direction suddenly

Red is so not travel unless absolutely necessary

decide in the morning, if it doesn't look safe, don't go. I don't think a taxi would be any safer

Falling branches/trees are by far the biggest risk - however these are equally a risk in a car, more so in fact as the car is travelling at greater speed.

You will get wet, but it will be no more dangerous than driving. We have a long unpaved lane to drive up (trees on both sides) then about a 1.5 mile drive on a tree lined road. I suspect anything could blow into us. We live in a very exposed bit of the country. But it will be safe enough. It would be annoying to walk in heavy rain, but what do you normally do when it rains? Do you have a friend with a car who could collect yours?

We're inland in the Netherlands and may not be going in. The radio is already issuing warnings to work from home if possible.
The schools here say that with a yellow weather warning the children are expected in, an orange warning is at the parents' discretion, and the schools are closed on red.
That said, DS has an 11km cycle ride in each direction, in an open landscape with tree-lined roads, so he won't be going in on yellow either unless we can give him a lift. They'll be no repercussions.

Yeah I agree, but like with covid you can't really blame people for swallowing it, the amount of warnings I've had you'd think the apocalypse was coming.

We're on the very exposed Kent coast but school is a 30-40 minute drive each way, so I'll wait and see what happens overnight/tomorrow morning to decide. My youngest DD is disabled so not an easy journey if we were to get stranded. Hoping the school takes the decision out of my hands.

I'm assuming you haven't read the "danger to life" part of the warning.

Just ask yourself what you would do without all these "nanny" warnings.
Quite honestly, I wouldn't leave my house if I believed any of them, luckily I am old enough and still with common sense to decided what I want or need to do.

My sons still on half term, but with what happened after the last storm, where flooding meant he was stranded at school for 5hours, if he were at school I wouldn't be sending him in if there was another amber alert. But we're rural, the school is rural and its 45min car ride away on a good day.

If it's not safe to be out walking it's not safe to be out in a car.

I'd assess in the morning. Very likely it will all be fine but if it's that extreme there's a good possibility school will be closed.

I was at school in 1987, walked there only to find teachers hadn't been able to get there and was sent home, so it's nothing to do with "what's wrong with people today".

I manage woodlands for a living. When windspeeds or gusts are above 40mph we don't work in the woods and advise people not to enter as that's when things tend to get a bit dicey.

At windspeeds above 40mph I don't let my kids walk to school either as their route passes by woodland. By the time you hit galeforce winds the school usually closes.