Storm Babet

Five Sisters, Glen Shiel

I had arranged to go north for a few days before Storm Babet was predicted. The Met Office put out a rare red warning for the east of Scotland from Perth to Aberdeen. It would be close and my daughter and grandchildren were flying to Inverness to join me. They were worried because they had heard that the Scottish Government were urging people not to travel. In my most optimistic manner, I reassured them it would be ok where we were going although they might get some heavy rain in Inverness.

I watched the Scottish Government Depute First Minister announce the arrangements to cope with the emergency, stressing the roles of the Police, Fire and Rescue, SEPA and Transport Scotland. The Scottish Government operate from the Resilience Centre in Edinburgh and they have always assumed that they are the main player in emergencies and that the above centralised organisations are the key actors. The reality is that flooding emergencies are very localised and it is the councils that are the first responders. They have the local intelligence that is crucial to coping with emergencies. They have to advise households and businesses to evacuate, set up rest centres, provide sandbags, provide 24/7 support and carry out road closures which are almost always local roads, not trunk roads,. 

The Resilience Centre obtains updates on what is happening on the ground drawing information from the councils as well as the police but this is usually retrospective whereas the local council emergency teams are operating in real-time. In 14 years of operating such a team, I can never recall any pertinent instructions or advice arriving from the Scottish Government although resources were made available for serious incidents and payments made after the event. Mutual aid was usually arranged by the good network of support that existed between councils, this was particularly the case with major incidents such as Dunblane and the Foot and Mouth outbreak in Dumfries and Galloway.

With all this in mind, I checked the Met Office forecasts for my route north and council websites for road closures before deciding to travel as planned. I had established that Storm Babet was unlikely to have any impact on my journey. Flooding and extreme weather are after all very localised.

It rained on the journey to Fort William but traffic was lighter than usual probably as a result of the Scottish Government urging people not to travel., From Fort William to Kyle of Lochalsh it was mainly sunny with a strong wind that made the trees shed their leaves and the late season Winnebagos sway a bit on the road. I was at my destination ahead of schedule. After unpacking, I watched the evening news and the impact of Storm Babet on parts of Angus. It had been a local tragedy, 400 people had been evacuated, three people had died from the South Esk river bursting its banks and trees falling in the wind. Rest centres were operating, local roads staff were closing roads and with Fire and Rescue helping frail residents. The Scottish Government was meanwhile treading water as it provided a commentatory on recent events.

The Resilience Centre was issuing news statements that had already been covered by local radio, council websites and User-generated content (USG). I became aware of the significance of the latter when I had a couple of hundred hits on an eight-year-old post, Storm Frank-visits-Aberfoyle following flooding there a couple of weeks ago. The same had happened earlier this year when some climbers were killed on Aonach Eagach Ridge and my posts on the climb went ballistic.  It is more evidence why the centre cannot hold. The genius of social media and artificial intelligence is that they draw on the knowledge of people at the scene, they deal in local detail and operate in real-time. These are the things that matter to those subjected to emergency events. 

Over the sea to Skye

Applecross Hills

Browned Off

Gales massacred more local forests

Today saw the new year begin the way the last one finished with abrupt and violent gales of over 100mph. We were awakened by the house shaking and the trees in the garden were bending at right angles. Just the onset of another year of climate change weather and we have been without power all day yet again. Since the arrival of the new Scottish Government Transport Minister, Keith Brown, we have had more bad weather disasters than in the previous ten years combined. Any competent statistician would be able to prove that the correlation between this increased number of weather events and the minister is very high.

The daily utterings of the Scottish Government have a dated irrelevant quality about them.  Installed in the Civil Emergency Centre in Edinburgh they collect and disseminate information and tell you what has been happening on a macro scale. Fine for voyeurs of bad weather but not much use to people in communities who want to know is the school going to open? are the carers going to visit? is it worth putting out the wheelie bin? and when will we get the power or telephone/broadband connection back?  Fortunately, a transistor radio and local radio stations are far more useful as are the websites of the power companies and the councils. Life is a bottom-up process, not a top-down one but this does not fit easily with the power-crazed mindsets of central government mandarins or ministers.

By the time we heard the minister on the radio mid-morning, the wind had abated, trees were down, vehicles had overturned and electricity had long gone. He was peddling old news, not advanced warnings or useful information. In conditions such as these, it is communities that matter, they are neighbours and providers along with the local public services.  And if we want to watch or hear about what is going on across the country then there is a very fine institution called the BBC that does this better than anyone else. When you want to take your kid to school or discover if the local road is flooded or closed it is local information from the service provider that matters not more soundbites from Big Brother.

The return of power happened in the late evening after we returned from an evening meal in the nearest village with power. A gang of SSE engineers had been having a meal in the pub and they were able to tell us that they had now restored the power.  We returned home to watch the BBC Dickens season, it has served up some tasty television over recent days including Armando Iunucci's genuine and affectionate appreciation of Dickens as a radical campaigner for social justice.  Christmas Carols may now have given way to Hard Times but on yet another day lit by candles, it can appear that we are back to the times of Dickens. We are just as much in need of some social justice today as in the nineteenth century because avarice and the abuse of power are almost as devastating to people's lives as climate change.

Thankfully, Scotland has been closed for the second day of its new year public holidays whilst its citizens sober up so we have been spared the devastation that might have occurred had people been working and children at school. Let's hope that the minister takes a day off tomorrow so that the service providers can get on with sorting out the aftermath of the latest weather without having to waste time feeding the minister with generalised updates that he can broadcast to the nation.