LONDON – Millions of people in Ireland and northern parts of the U.K. were urged to stay at home Friday as hurricane-force winds disabled power networks and brought widespread travel disruptions.
Forecasters issued a rare “red” weather warning, meaning danger to life, across the whole island of Ireland and central and southwest Scotland.
Ireland was hit with wind gusts of 114 ph (183 kph), the strongest since World War II, as a winter storm spiraled in from the Atlantic before hitting Scotland.
Schools were closed, and trains, ferries and more than 1,000 flights were canceled in the Republic of Ireland and the U.K., even as far south as London Heathrow, as the system, named Storn Éowyn (pronounced Ay-oh-win) by weather authorities, roared in. The storm was moving fast, though, and should have cleared Scotland’s shores by late Friday.
City centers, such as Dublin in Ireland, Belfast in Northern Ireland and Glasgow in Scotland were eerily quiet, much like the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as shops stayed closed and people heeded the advice to not venture out. For those that did leave home and were caught in one of the wind gusts, it was a struggle to stay upright.
“Please just stay at home if you can,” Northern Ireland First Minister Michelle O´Neill said on BBC Radio Ulster. “We´re in the eye of the storm now. We are in the period of the red alert.”
The Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh shut its doors and Scottish First Minister John Swinney said: “We have to be clear. People should not travel.”
More than 700,000 homes and businesses in Ireland and almost 100,000 in Northern Ireland were without power due to “unprecedented, widespread and extensive” damage to electricity infrastructure, the Irish Electricity Supply Board said. More than 20,000 customers in Scotland are also reported to have lost power.
Ireland´s weather office, Met Eireann, said the 114 mph gusts were recorded at Mace Head on the west coast, beating a record of 113 mph (182 kph) set in 1945.
Wind speeds in Scotland were expected to be slightly lower through the day, though still very high, and authorities urged people to remain vigilant, especially in coastal areas.
Part of the storm´s energy originated with the system that brought historic snowfall along the Gulf Coast of the U.S., said Jason Nicholls, lead international forecaster at the private weather company AccuWeather.
The storm is being propelled by the jet stream and is being fed by energy in upper levels of the atmosphere. A rapid drop in air pressure is expected and could make Éowyn a bomb cyclone, which happens when a storm´s pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours.
Scientists say pinpointing the exact influence of climate change on a storm is challenging, but all storms are happening in an atmosphere that is warming abnormally fast due to human-released pollutants like carbon dioxide and methane.
“As the climate gets warmer, we can expect these storms to become even more intense, with greater damages,” said Hayley Fowler, a professor of climate change impacts at Newcastle University.
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