The Met Office advice on these warnings includes:
“Yellow and Amber warnings represent a range of impact levels and likelihoods. This means it is important to read each warning to know what level of impact you can expect for your chosen warning area – and how likely those impacts are to occur.”
“These impacts can include damage to property, travel delays and cancellations, loss of water supplies, power cuts and, in the most severe cases, bring a danger to life.”
Proving correct with both location and outcome, the South and South West of England bore the brunt of conditions, as did parts of Western Europe with flooding, damage, power cuts and numbers of fatalities being reported. The Met Office also commented that the mean sea level pressure reading for England and Wales in November is the lowest on record.
The problems may not yet be over as the Environment Agency are now highlighting the risk of inland flooding. With saturated ground conditions and a number of rivers already “high”, over 40 flood warnings and 190 flood alerts across the South, Midlands and North West of England (Check for flooding in England - GOV.UK (check-for-flooding.service.gov.uk)). Parts of Northern Ireland are already suffering badly with flooding.
Hot on the heels of Agnes (27th-28th September 2023) and Babet (18th-21st October 2023), Ciarán is the 3rd set of storm conditions we’ve had in a little over a month. So how prepared are you when and where “Debi”, “Elin”, “Fergus”, “Gerrit” and “Henk” may occur?
Where remote working now causes much less of a problem, when people are advised not to travel data management and power, for example, could still cause issues. Whether or not you have been affected by the recent storms, the vagaries of our weather (quite literally) mean none of us can afford to be complacent. If like me, you’d been getting company advice in advance/preparation for the weather as it occurred - although this time it tracked well South of our office – that should be a reassurance. If you didn’t, perhaps you should be asking a question or two.