The way we were – back in 2010

OKAY, so we might have moaned about some bouts of wind and rain over the holiday period gone by . . . but it’s all a long way removed from what we went through during one awful December in 2010.

Connacht Tribune staff photographer, Joe O’Shaughnessy, has resurrected some pictures he took of a frozen Galway countryside back in the run-up to Christmas in 2010 when frozen pipes, iced roads, and houses without water, were the order of the day.

Coincidentally, 10 years prior to that – in December 2000 – we also took something of a hammering from the weather with frost, snow and ice also dominating our rural landscape during the latter part of that month.

However, it was the Winter of 2010 that broke all records in terms of severe frosts, heavy snows and the sheer longevity of the harsh weather which brought untold hardship for householders and farmers across the region. An article in the Connacht Tribune of Friday, January 7, 2011, documented what people had gone through the previous December.

“The mean temperature for December [2010], as officially recorded in Galway city [by the late Frank Gaffney] was  (minus) -0.2° Celsius – a whopping 7°C below the average for the last month of the year,” the report recalled.

Conditions got particularly extreme on the week of December 18 to 25, 2010, when there were ‘seven savage nights of frost’ with temperatures ranging from -8° Celsius to -15° Celsius.

At the time, Frank Gaffney recalled in the report of the Connacht Tribune, that such extremes of cold hadn’t featured on any records ‘up until now and hopefully wouldn’t be matched again’. He summed up the month as follows:

“The days before Christmas did the real damage with the frost penetrating deep into the ground – the severity of those frosts, one on top of the other, just had to do damage.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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