Entries Tagged 'weather' ↓

Nothing seems to go right for our poor under-secretary of state for roads, trains and drains.  When news of his announcement as minister of railways was given the good Lord showed what He thought by smiting Ipswich station with lightening.  Now he’s on the hook for the lack of rock salt.

It seems that there was a phenomenally poor prediction and calculation of the rock salt needed. While I could get out Hayek and talk about how this failure is bound to happen, why not look at something less controversial, how rubbish the Met Office proved to be?

They are continually erring on the warm side of any medium term predictions and while this is merely annoying when they predict a “barbecue summer”, people are dying because of their poor predictions this month.  Piers Corbyn, left of Labour activist and brother of ultra left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, says that he has predicted the cold snap with far greater accuracy far in advance.

His contention is that the Met Office didn’t just believe in global warming, they really, really believed it and were prepared to predict on the basis of it.  And that’s why people are dying on the roads and we don’t know whether we’ll have to ration gas through the cold snap.

This is not to say that global warming is nonsense.  As the BBC and the government (or did I repeat myself?) have been telling us for the last week the weather is not the same as the climate.  A pity the Met Office seems to have forgotten.

(Just to cheer you all up, Piers Corbyn reckons that the cold snap will prove more than a snap and despite a couple of warm spells go well into February.)

So our MP is put in charge of the roads and railways and within days Ipswich station is struck by lightening and the A14 is flooded and blocked by a crash.  Next we’ll be having plagues of frogs and locusts. Either the Almighty is displeased or Chris Mole is cursed with terrible luck.

Like many people who live in Bridge I was held up in the drama today.  For once I’m not going to moan about the railway company, who did the best they could under extraordinary circumstances – and if a chimney being struck by lightening is not extraordinary then I don’t what is.  In the end we were held up for one and a half hours – although the flow of information was constant and reassuring, and the staff pulled together. 

Ipswich station was also well run considering that it had been evacuated just twenty minutes before we got there, with even delay-repay forms being handed to us as we got out of the station.  It is a stark contrast to the times when much smaller incidents seem to have given the railway a nervous breakdown.

Anyway here are the stories from the BBC and the Evening Star.

Any way here are a couple of photos that have appeared on the BBC and in the Evening Star, if anyones got other pictures, particularly in Bridge, let me know on james@bridgeward.org.uk

For the first time in years we actually had some (albeit minor) flooding in our house although my wife was at home and had the presence of mind to get some newspapers to soak it up so no damage was done.  It seems that it was a problem with the drains which soon sorted itself out, but it does show that the idea floated by Phillip Smart, one of our non-resident Labour councillors that the existing flood barrier should be lowered to be “more pleasing” to the eye is madness.