"IN Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen," according to Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady. The same, indeed, might well be said of Ireland. Although the wind occasionally howls at Hurricane Force, or Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale, hurricanes in the strict scientific sense, just do not occur at these latitudes. Such a phenomenon needs a warm and humid ambience to survive, and once it moves northwards over the colder waters of the North Atlantic its strength wanes and its ferocity rapidly diminishes.
What we do experience in Ireland from time to time however, are very severe North Atlantic depressions into which a hurricane may have been subsumed a week or so before, and which in the popular mind becomes associated with the hurricane's name. There have been two memorable instances in Ireland in the last few decades: one was "Debbie" on September 16th, 1961, and the other was Hurricane Charlie, which hit our shores 10 years ago yesterday, on August 25th, 1986.
The two were as different as chalk and cheese. Debbie had been born as a hurricane in the balmy waters of the Caribbean some five or six days previously. Its intensity abated as it began its journey across the ocean, but by the time the storm reached Ireland it had acquired a new lease of life and gusts in excess of 100 miles per hour caused great damage in the western half of the country. Charlie, however, had a very different trademark: he was wet.
As a proper hurricane, Charlie was first spotted off the coast of South Carolina on August 15th. As it moved along the eastern seaboard of the US, its winds over land were strong but not unusual damage was minimal, and indeed the heavy rains were welcomed in drought stricken North Carolina and Virginia. By August 19th the weakening Charlie was no longer officially a hurricane, and appeared as a nondescript and unremarkable depression moving eastwards across the Atlantic. That, one might have thought, was that.
But four days later the spirit of Charlie sprang to life again. By the early hours of August 24th, re invigorated by an influx of cold air that had swept down from Iceland to enhance the contrast with the warmer air on its southern flank, the now rapidly deepening depression lay 300 miles to the south west of Kerry. Over the next 48 hours, as a low with a central pressure of about 980 hectopascals, it passed along the south coast of Ireland before heading into Wales and wasting away over England and the North Sea.
Charlie's essential character, however, had not changed since leaving Carolina: its winds were strong, yet not exceptional, but the rainfall certainly was and it poured down in unprecedented quantities on southern and eastern parts of Ireland, breaking long established records and leaving widespread flooding in its wake.
The rain began to fall in the south west at about 9 p.m. on Sunday August 24th, and during the early part of the following day southern counties bore the brunt of the heavy rains and on shore gales. Later on the 25th, however, the rain became even heavier as it spread to eastern parts, and for Dublin, Bray and neighbouring areas the gales and downpours of the night of August 25th/26th, 1986, provided some of the worst weather in living memory.
The heaviest rain fell in the Dublin and Wicklow mountains, with 280 mm, or 11 inches, being recorded on Kippure. Nearer sea level, the 200 mm recorded at Kilcoole, Co Wicklow, set a new Irish record for the greatest amount of rainfall in a single day, and over the catchments of the Dodder and Dargle Rivers, falls in excess of 150 mm were the norm. Both rivers overflowed their banks, flooding more than 400 private houses and business premises to a depth of several feet. Throughout Ballsbridge and Sandymount in Dublin, and further south in Bray, dozens of families were hurriedly evacuated as their homes succumbed to the worst flooding to hit the area since the early years of the century.
In the aftermath of the storm indelibly remembered as Hurricane Charlie, meteorologists calculated that the severity of the rainfall was such as might be expected statistically to occur on average once in every 100 years. Perhaps 81 might have been a better figure, since the floods of 1986 hit the east coast precisely on the anniversary of the last major disaster of that kind in the area; on August 25th, 1905, heavy rains had caused what was probably the most severe and widespread flooding ever experienced in the east of Ireland, and resulted in the evacuation of over 1,000 people from their homes in Bray.
