h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Last night's storm has now died down. We didn't feel it too bad in Dublin, but one person was killed by a falling tree in Mullingar in the midlands, a roof collapsed in a railway station in the south, and something like 15,000 people are without power.

I drove up to Mullingar with a sofa on my roof on Tuesday evening, a round trip of about 4 hours including the time to get the sofa onto the car, off the car, and the obligatory cup of tea when I got there. We were clearing the last stuff out of Mrs G's late father's house. The final papers should be signed today and the house officially sold. I noticed it was already very windy on Tuesday, but it apparently got much worse yesterday, causing the fatal accident.

It's a good job you got that round trip over and done with the day before the storm. The winds here were the worst I've known, my front door was rattling on its hinges! And my bird-feeder plastic water bowl blew out. This was stuck so fast I had been able to remove it to clean it, so I was using a toothbrush with the bowl in situ. It's terrible that someone died. There's a missing person in our area too, a man got washed off a boat which was moored on the River Trent.

"I had been _un_able to remove it to clean it,"

Oh, I forgot to mention that a load of cars were wrecked in the west of Ireland because a storm surge caused the tide to be much higher than normal and they were flooded. I don't know if your car would ever recover from being in 3 feet of sea water.

Modern cars - not a chance - even if it was dried out the electrics would be completely shot... If you've got an old car it might come through a flood in one piece - of course you'd have to take it to pieces to clean and dry it, otherwise it'd just disintegrate into a cloud of rust six months later.

I had a car did that without the dowsing, back in the late 1970's. It was a Vauxhall Viva, L reg... many L's ago.

We got off lightly, most of the loose stuff found its way between the shed and garage.

Although we did lose one of the poles for the washing line, luckily it fell away from the bungalow!

lil x

It's due to get windy again today, but this time only a gale rather than a storm. My brother-in-law is over from Seattle and he'd forgotten how windy it gets in Ireland in the winter.