Two storms, 829,400 reconnections, and now the fog

Britain’s stormy week is ending the way storms usually end: with a list. Storm Austen came through the south, Storm Boelo through the north and west, and an unnamed low followed on Tuesday¹. The Met Office’s provisional figures give Austen a top gust of 69 knots on the Isle of Wight and Boelo an observed pressure of 948.1 hPa, the deeper of the two¹. Austen’s central pressure fell by about 30 hPa in 24 hours, which meets the definition of explosive cyclogenesis, a “weather bomb”¹.

The useful number, though, is the dull one. By 09:00 CET on Tuesday the Energy Networks Association said 829,400 customers had been reconnected and 7,800 were still without power in Great Britain². On Sunday afternoon it had been 161,400². Engineers did that work in winds that, for stretches of Sunday, made it unsafe to climb up the infrastructure to fix faults². A man died near Castle Douglas when a tree fell on him on Sunday morning³; the reconnection ledger does not undo that, but it is the part of the story that was within anyone’s control.

The rain is the other ledger. Boelo dropped 134.4 mm in Ross and Cromarty, and Austen 77.6 mm at Abbey St Bathans in Berwickshire¹. More than 130 mm fell at Cluanie Inn in the Highlands³. A modelled grid point near Cluanie puts October’s total to Monday at 269.0 mm, against a 1991–2020 average of 133.5 mm for the same 26 days⁵. Desk arithmetic: about twice the usual, in one of the wettest corners of Europe.

SEPA kept an amber coastal flood risk for the Northern Isles on Tuesday, with storm surge, spring tides and large waves expected to push water over sea walls around high tide⁴. It expects moderate coastal impacts to reach the Moray Firth and Aberdeenshire on Wednesday, with rain still falling on saturated ground inland⁴.

Then the pattern turns. The Met Office says a ridge of high pressure is building and should block the most active Atlantic lows, bringing lighter winds and drier weather¹. Its warning is that calm brings its own hazard: clear skies, light winds and North Sea moisture favour fog, possibly slow to clear, into early November¹. If you are driving in Britain this week, the storm advice changes from “stay away from the coast” to “leave a longer gap”.