Storm Éowyn
January 24, 2025 12:07 PM   Subscribe

Storm Éowyn has caused widespread damage across Ireland (and the UK).

With extensive power and mobile phone network outages the full extent of the devastation is still coming to light. Ongoing live coverage (which also summarises the events to date):
Irish Times
RTÉ
Irish Independent
The Journal

While some are discovering the challenges of power cuts in 2025, others are turning to the comforts of the sliced pan and the country has been coated with a fine covering of salt, dust and dirt.
posted by roolya_boolya (43 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
In the 21st Century, whirlwind reaps you.
posted by jamjam at 12:23 PM on January 24 [2 favorites]


some extremely messed-up weather hitting Scotland, too
posted by scruss at 12:25 PM on January 24


There's a person in Ireland whose full name is the same as mine (I am in the US and have a very common name) and who signed up for something at their local Tesco with my email address, so I've been getting email notifications about this from Tesco Ireland.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 12:29 PM on January 24 [15 favorites]


Hang in there, Irish friends. Those winds are hurricane force (183kph) -- serious business. It's amazing when so much power passes through an area: you emerge afterwards and roam the neighborhood, wondering how bad the damage will be. *shudder*

(Does "sliced pan" mean the same thing that "a loaf of sliced bread" means in the U.S.? I have heard it as a song lyric before, and always wondered.)
posted by wenestvedt at 12:43 PM on January 24 [2 favorites]


First the Witch King Angmar. Now this!
posted by higginba at 12:50 PM on January 24 [20 favorites]


Does "sliced pan" mean the same thing that "a loaf of sliced bread" means in the U.S.?

It does indeed. Also The Sawdoctors are a great band!
posted by roolya_boolya at 12:54 PM on January 24 [2 favorites]


> Does "sliced pan" mean the same thing that "a loaf of sliced bread" means in the U.S.?

Yes precisely, you might also see references to Brennan's as well, an extremely common breadmaker here.

Shops here in Dublin were closed until 2pm today until the storm had (mostly) passed, no trains/trams/buses were running, there's a few trees and a bit of damage here and there, but the rest of the country fared worse - there's a lot of houses without power out in the countryside, which might take up to a week to fix.
posted by BigCalm at 12:55 PM on January 24 [4 favorites]


Yeah, it's windy, but the Traitors!
posted by biffa at 12:55 PM on January 24 [2 favorites]


I have family in a remote area of the west of Ireland and they are totally out of contact because of power and phone outages. Seems to be the case in large parts of rural Ireland as I've a few friends in the same situation.

Apparently there's another (less intense) storm that might hit Sunday morning, which could complicate the clean up and restoration of services.
posted by roolya_boolya at 12:57 PM on January 24 [2 favorites]


Weather system naming in Europe

(i'm with the nws on this one. "The National Weather Service does not name winter storms because a winter storm's impact can vary from one location to another, and storms can weaken and redevelop, making it difficult to define where one ends and another begins.")
posted by Clowder of bats at 12:57 PM on January 24 [3 favorites]


A village in Cornwall got hit by a mini-tornado. (Climate change? What climate change?)
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 1:10 PM on January 24 [3 favorites]


The national weather service? That narrows it down.
posted by biffa at 1:15 PM on January 24 [7 favorites]


We were almost the only parish in Ireland that had power at 0600hrs this morning [725,000 fails in a customer base of 2,300,000]. Éowyn was still drubbing away outside but I ran down to the kitchen for an easy [just pop switch on kettle] pot of tea expecting to be in the dark any moment. But our status fell from red to orange to yellow to normal through the day without further mishap. The roof of the neighbour's shed leapt the fence and landed in my SiL's garden on the Waterford coast. Anecdata: we had [40 hrs] less electricity and more [4 vs 1] trees down with Darragh, the previous named storm, at the beginning of December. It took a week then to restore almost all power across the country and that was with half the number of outages.
posted by BobTheScientist at 1:55 PM on January 24 [9 favorites]


And from the forecast in the app I use, the next one comes through on Tuesday morning.
posted by krisjohn at 2:20 PM on January 24


IT FUCKEN EOWYMDY
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 2:29 PM on January 24 [29 favorites]


In depth explainer of how Éowyn formed from the UK Met Office (via boards.ie weather forum).
posted by roolya_boolya at 2:58 PM on January 24 [3 favorites]


Oh God my friend in Bandon is already tearing her hair out looking after elderly parents and now THIS.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 3:11 PM on January 24 [2 favorites]


how Éowyn formed

Well, when the King's sister and the Chief Marshall of the Mark of Rohan love each other very much...
posted by thatwhichfalls at 3:18 PM on January 24 [27 favorites]


i'm with the nws on this one. "The National Weather Service does not name winter storms because a winter storm's impact can vary from one location to another, and storms can weaken and redevelop, making it difficult to define where one ends and another begins."

In Ireland certainly the naming of storms works as intended to draw attention to the seriousness of the storm. Once there's a name people start looking into the potential impact on their part of the country.

And, as a few posters here have demonstrated, depending on the name there's potential for a bit of craic and banter.
posted by roolya_boolya at 3:34 PM on January 24 [9 favorites]


I gather that a storm of this magnitude has been fairly rare in Ireland and the UK? The second link mentioned Hurricane Debbie in 1961 as being their worst storm, but it sounds like the wind speeds were comparable.
Some pretty amazing photos. Glad the death/injury toll was so low. EmpressCallipygos, I hope your friend has power soon and doesn't have to deal with major damages after. I feel for the older folks and people with physical issues dealing with the aftermath.
posted by BlueHorse at 3:35 PM on January 24 [1 favorite]


I gather that a storm of this magnitude has been fairly rare in Ireland and the UK?

Last one this strong that I remember was thirteen years ago, which peeled the roofing felt off my Edinburgh flat (and that one was apparently the strongest in thirteen years itself). Fortunately our stairwell just had the roofers out a week ago to do some maintenance, so it's in pretty good shape this time—no sign of trouble looking out of the attic window. The power has been flickering off and on for the past 24 hours, resetting the clocks on the oven and the microwave every time. Had to leave my desktop switched off all day.

They made sure we all got the message to stay indoors: mobile phones here got a forced alert around 5.30 yesterday, accompanied by an alarm sound I've never heard a phone make before.
posted by rory at 3:52 PM on January 24 [6 favorites]


First the Witch King Angmar. Now this!

[pedant]

Actually, it's the Witch-King of Angmar

...Angmar being Witch-King'ian for Northern Eriador (evidently)

[/pedant]
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 4:02 PM on January 24 [7 favorites]


Angmar being Witch-King'ian for Northern Eriador

[extrapedant]

Actually, Angmar is a mutation of both Angbar and Angamar, meaning 'Iron home' in Sindarin and Quenya respectively.

[/extrapedant]
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:12 PM on January 24 [10 favorites]


i'm with the nws on this on
The national weather service? That narrows it down.


It's probably a country like Australia, Brazil or China where they're not on a continental shelf with a consistent level of onshore winds thanks to the Coriolis effect. I imagine it's probably some place where they don't even have any real offshore wind generation even if it were to have much coastline.

Probably somewhere parochial enough they can't imagine other countries having significant weather on different parameters to what they're used to, but still being relatively resilient to it.
posted by ambrosen at 5:28 PM on January 24 [4 favorites]


People who listen to the Shipping Forecast (vital for sailors but also a uniquely British ritual in bedrooms far from the sea) will have heard an unusual term: Hurricane force 12 winds off Shannon and Rockall, and (in the online textual version) sea state in those areas described as "phenomenal."

Normally their highest wind rating is "violent storm force 11", and the roughest sea state is "very high." I didn't even know there was a sea state beyond "very high," but apparently if the waves are over 14m it's "phenomenal."

If you're wondering what's up with the wind numbers: the shipping forecast uses the Beaufort Scale, whose descriptions are quite poetic (they had to be, since they date from the early 1800s, before devices to measure wind speed accurately were common). Wind gusts off the west coast of Ireland were actually clocked at 114mph, which is a Beaufort 15 rather than 12.

...and I'm here typing this because my partner, who was planning to come over, had his train journey interrupted by a tree falling across the line. But at least there was no worse damage in his area or mine, so that's lucky.
posted by Pallas Athena at 5:33 PM on January 24 [13 favorites]




I came for the Irish, stayed for the pedants
posted by ginger.beef at 5:42 PM on January 24 [6 favorites]


I mean, it's just really tiresome to have a bunch of foreigners tell us we're doing weather wrong every single time it comes up.
posted by ambrosen at 5:53 PM on January 24 [10 favorites]


The centre of that low was 940 mbs when I checked just before it hit the west coast. That is INSANE.
posted by salishsea at 8:40 PM on January 24


Tech has its advantages. We had 5 full days to batten hatches and add a concrete block to the wheelbarrow. On Weds 22 Jan 25 I gazed across the valley, through the scrubby trees, to my neighbour Mattie's house. It was windless, Beaufort 0 = calm, smoke rises vertically. I reflected that, when Mattie was a chap in 1955, he'd have had no inkling that a big storm was brewing in the Atlantic. They were as ill informed about future weather as people were for Oíche na Gaoithe Móire The Night of the Big Wind on 6th Jan 1839. The NoBW was so striking and memorable, that in 1909, when the first non-contributory pension was introduced in the United Kingdom, the key question to illiterate applicants for this dole was "How big were you on the Night of the Big Wind?". If you could remember that event, you were definitely over 70 and so eligible.
posted by BobTheScientist at 11:50 PM on January 24 [20 favorites]


I’m in Dundalk; the wind didn’t die down here till about 3pm yesterday. Thankfully we didn’t lose power; this town is fairly resilient about such things. But there is a line of trees along the railway right outside our house that I was a bit worried about.
posted by macdara at 2:51 AM on January 25 [3 favorites]


The power outages and day-one uncertainty about the true extent of the damage is a shitty experience. I can empathize.

Hopefully they get things sorted out quickly, and the predicted storm on Sunday isn't severe enough to complicate matters much.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 3:17 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]


Here in Dundee, the weather station I can see from my window reported 102mph gusts at the peak of the storm. A block of flats just down the road lost a large chunk of its roof, scattering insulation and big metal panels over a pretty large area. This has happened before, but the last couple of really big storms we've had were at night - this time it was during the day, so police and council workers were rushing around during the storm trying to close off roads and walkways and get cars out of the way. Much respect to them - I wouldn't have wanted to be out in that weather, let alone with bits of roof flying around.
posted by offog at 6:38 AM on January 25 [4 favorites]


[extrapedant]

I looked for a good translation, but yeah, I knew you were coming. "Worrying about you woulda been like 'worrying about the sun coming up...'
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 9:23 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]


The power outages and day-one uncertainty about the true extent of the damage

This thread prompted me to check my own data: there was a pretty measurable dip (70% down at peak) in the en_IE traffic for the global internet service I support yesterday (relative to same time last week). Until a few hours ago, it was still 10% off, but in the past hour or two has normalized. Our customer base skews rich though, so I'm sure the full extent was even greater in scope and longer in duration.

eu-west-1 is based in Dublin, and one of the cheaper EU regions. I'm a bit surprised none of the SRE communities mentioned the potential for the storm to knock out service. But it didn't, so I guess AWS did their job well.
posted by pwnguin at 9:38 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]


[really working hard on a way to out-pedant y'all; check back later]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 10:41 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]


This aftermath video from a farmer in the midlands gives an idea of the extent of the damage left behind Éowyn (again via boards.ie / weather).

And this is repeated across the island...
posted by roolya_boolya at 3:01 PM on January 26 [1 favorite]


Ouch. Someone on that forum mentioned the estimated power restoration got bumped another day. Here's hoping it doesn't take much longer for everyone. When 2011 happened here it was about a week before we got power back, and that was in the TVA's service area.

Storms like that are no joke. Good luck with the recovery!
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 5:02 AM on January 27 [1 favorite]


Thanks howbigisthistextfield. As of now around 170,000 people are still without power, with 100,000 estimated to wait another week for reconnection.

The ESB powercheck website shows the extent of the faults, which are still mushrooming. As bigger faults are repaired sometimes a number of smaller faults further down the line are identified.
posted by roolya_boolya at 9:31 AM on January 28


BobTheScientist, the idea of putting a concrete block in a wheelbarrow would have never occurred to me. So many questions.
Did it fill with water or did you tip it over first? Did you put it to the leeward side of the house? Do you not have a shed or garage? Do you have a garden or critters to haul for? Is this how everyone deals with their wheelbarrow in Ireland?
posted by BlueHorse at 12:17 PM on January 29 [1 favorite]


@BlueHorse: Aaaand the wheelbarrow answers [TMI alert!]:
1) turn over wheelbarrow before adding weight, but concrete blocks aren't always enough. The kids' trampoline kicked off mere concrete many years ago and travelled 50 m uphill before bursting asunder against a tree.
2) Leeward the house changes as storms pass through
3) We have sheds, so many and such variety. Part of my prep for Éowyn was to upgrade the tie-downs at the corners of a 70 y.o. corrugated iron roof which is only held up (or indeed down) by prayer.
4) the sheep must fend for themselves but really appreciate when trees come down and deliver a feast of ivy Hedera helix leaves in midwinter
5) we are unique hereabouts in our assiduous care of wheelbarrows
For the historical record, this morning, 11 days after Éowyn, "25,000 homes, farms, schools and businesses remain without power and ~400 premises without water
posted by BobTheScientist at 3:23 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]


Thank you, Bob! (may I call you Bob?)
Lovely answer. It gives me a sense of place and how the storm has affected you/your local community.

we are unique hereabouts in our assiduous care of wheelbarrows
Once you find a wheelbarrow that suits you, you tend to be protective of it. My barrow is like Pratchett's original sword of our fathers. We've replaced the wheel, the handles, and even some of the bent undercarriage bracing, but it is still the one true wheelbarrow and gets put up in a storm and doesn't get lent out.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:52 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]


A colleague of mine finally had their power restored TODAY.
posted by Samarium at 3:45 AM on February 5


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