Even the gritters struggled to cope in the wake of Storm Goretti. One of Devon county council’s yellow lorries overturned as it was tackling an icy Dartmoor road morning.
The truck was one of many casualties of Goretti’s hurricane-force winds along the Cornish coast and snow dumps up to 27cm deep across Wales and Scotland. Power lines were felled, trains cancelled and football games postponed after the extreme weather. The most serious incident was in Mawgan in Cornwall, where a man in his 50s died after a tree toppled on to his caravan.
More is on the way, the Met Office warned. Although Goretti dwindled as it moved northwards, another weather system forming over the Atlantic is due to arrive on Sunday.
Forecasters expect snowfall in north-eastern Scotland and England, up to 20cm deep on higher ground, while the rest of the country is bracing for heavy rainfall and the possibility of flooding caused by a combination of melting snow and rain.
Nearly 30,000 homes still had no electricity on Saturday morning and about 3,000 are unlikely to be able to turn the lights on until Monday, according to the National Grid’s power cuts tracker. FA cup games and football league matches were called off because of frozen pitches.
On Saturday, with sunshine offering a brief interlude, people began to count Goretti’s cost. There were several lucky escapes. A 7-tonne removal truck was blown over after it stopped on the A30 in Cornwall. The West Country Removals driver, Macauley Harris, managed to get out in time, but he was “terrified”, according to owner Viv Wills.
Hundreds of trees were blown over during the storm. The Met Office put the most extreme winds at 99mph, in St Mary’s on the Isles of Scilly, but the National Coastwatch Institution recorded a gust of 123mph at Padstow, Cornwall.
The trees on St Michael’s Mount have withstood a century of weather conditions on the southern coast of Cornwall, including the Great Storm of 1987, when forecaster Michael Fish dismissed talk of the hurricane which killed 22 people in England and France. But on Friday nearly 100 of them had been uprooted by Goretti’s winds, scarring the landscape around the medieval castle used as a filming location for TV shows including House of the Dragon.
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The storm was even stronger in parts of northern France and Germany. In Normandy, 380,000 homes were without power after the storm hit and gusts reached 134mph in some areas.
Scientists are beginning to classify weather events such as Storm Goretti “multi-hazard events” in which the combination of different issues escalates the risks to people, property and infrastructure.
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“Storm Goretti is an example of why we need to increasingly think beyond single hazards,” said Prof Christopher White, professor in climate extremes and resilience at the University of Strathclyde.
“These complex, compounding features and the potential for widespread cascading impacts tend to drive the most severe disruption and risk to life.
“Even with modern forecasting systems, advancing multi‑hazard prediction and early warning remains such a pressing scientific and operational challenge.”
Photographs by Matt Keeble/PA Wire