Nothing like a good storm to focus the minds of a country

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There is probably nothing to compare with a major weather event when it comes to focusing the minds of a nation on a single topic. Up until two weeks ago, the name Lorenzo wouldn’t have meant much to the vast majority of the Irish population but within a matter of days, it was the most uttered word on the lips of the country’s population. And then it blew off in the middle of the night with barely a whimper when most of us were solidly in the world of nod!

Great storms are nothing to new of course but ironically one of the reasons that they stick in our minds so much is that broadly speaking they are a relatively infrequent event, which is not the case with our friends in the Caribbean or along the east coast of the USA. Thankfully we do tend to avoid the extremes in terms of weather events, and only very infrequently, do we find ourselves on the hurricane trail. Winter storms are of course a different matter but on the whole, they lack the punch of the hurricanes, who have souped-up engines due to their high energy origins in warm sea water off the West African coastline.

The hurricane path during the early Autumn season in the Northern Hemisphere is determined by the trade winds that blow east to west across the Atlantic, sweeping the tropical storms with them until they tend to blow out over land when reaching the Caribbean islands or the south-eastern coast of the USA. Here and there – but thankfully not too often – the hurricanes do something of a U-turn in the mid-Atlantic and instead of proceeding westward, take aim for our shores. This is exactly what happened with Lorenzo last week and probably the most famous – or should that be infamous – U-turn of all, was Hurricane Debbie, which hit our shores on the Saturday of September 16, 1961.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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