Fakkn Darragh

There is a sense in some quarters that Met Eireann tends to throw out Orange and Red weather warnings with gay abandon. That leaves them in the position of having to say "no no we really mean it this time . . . don't make unnecessary Crossmolinas". Storm Darraaaaargh arrived at tea-time Friday 06Dec24 upgraded to Status Orange wind for the whole country, Red for Atlantic NW. Obsessively checking on the nullschool weather map , as I do, I could see the storm barrelling relentlessly across the N Atlantic and crumping into the Wild Atlantic Way.

Two hours later, just after midnight, we lost power [with a couple of flickers then plunging darkness] despite being a long old way from any coasts or any Red counties. We are misfortunate living in a sparsely populated rural back water because [and proper order] when the ESB does triage on where to restore power first, sparsely populated rural back waters come after schools, towns, google server farms, hospitals. If you're a dairy farmer you need a generator, because ain't nobody going milk 160 cows by hand . . . and how would you get it down to 4°C a.s.a.p.?

Those who built our farm-and-yard were great vernacular architects and faced everything South on a downhill slope with the out-buildings sheltering the yard from the predominant Westerlies and the chilling Siberian Easterly winds. 80 years ago, Old Jim he planted a shelter-belt of Scots Pine Pinus sylvestris round the acre that includes house, yard and haggard. All bets are off though in a global warming world where the warmer ocean fizzes up the wind. We are now in a managed retreat from living surrounded by trees and hugging them as we pass.

After storms, my first light task is to go out for a walk to assess the damage and count the sheep. If N_sheep = zero, a fence is down somewhere and the flock is whooping it up in the next county. Also I need to know if the lane from our gate to the county road is clear. Saturday morning I found a number of trees lying W→E at right angles to the ditches/walls that had anchored them for the last several decades. My next action was to send an ironic txt to my eponymous pal "Fakkn Darragh, throwing shapes agane. We are 3 trees down. How are y'all?" As I was out, I went to visit our nearest neighbour, at the bottom of the lane, and found his front garden full of horizontal trees. Part of his Cupressus x leylandii hedge, allowed to get far too big, had clattered against a lanky 30 y.o. Eucalyptus and brought that to the ground as well. I could hear his voice "I'm okay" and if I knelt down could see the lower part of his legs, but nothing of the [undamaged] house behind him.

My first task, though, was to deal with a rowan / mountain ash / caorthann = Sorbus aucuparia, which like my neighbour's trees had fallen out of one of the ditches and neatly filled the lane with a six-foot wall of ivy Hedera helix and horizontal rowan branches. Two hours later, I had reduced this impenetrable wall to a single trunk-supporting branch which any person or sheep could step over but prevented vehicular access to the uplands. I was just finishing up when the branch settled, pinned my saw and I borked the chain getting it out.  So I had to leave things thus:

you can see the lane up beyond the obstacle. And hey it's sunny after the storm: quite makes you believe in god or at least Gen9:13. That lane filled to the brim with drifted snow in late Feb 2018 which is another sort of impassable.

Sunday afternoon, I had time for him-next-door (an even more recent blow-in than ourselves) and joined a meitheal of miscellaneously skilled and equipped neighbours clearing a path through the Eucalyptus. For every person who was in the garden cutting pulling and stacking logs and brash, at least one car stopped to gawp or get out of their car and offer unasked-for advice to say how the clearance should be done. For the second time [first] in four weeks I can harrumph about the hurlers on the ditch. I dunno why it's so much easier to find fault than pick up a shovel and help. These clear-up operations are so often a Javi Problem: if you set to (with help is better) you can make substantive progress in a couple of hours. And by tea-time yesterday, we were confident that our neighbour could get his motorbike on the county road liberated from his brushwood prison.

We got power back at 16:00, forty (40) hours after it went out. Some of our neighbours were for throwing food out of their freezers. Me, I was for eating a hella gurt quantity of ice-cream in case it was spoiled.

Postscript for posterity: gusts of 120km/h were recorded at Shannon; homes and businesses 400,000 were without power: some are looking a week w/o power + 35,000 broadband fails; the Holyhead ferry terminal was whacked out of commission.