Ireland recorded its strongest-ever wind gusts on Friday as “destructive” Storm Eowyn barrelled in from the Atlantic, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without power, grounding flights and shutting schools, officials said.
Gusts of 183 kilometres per hour — breaking an 80-year-old record — brought down power lines as felled trees blocked roads and an ice-skating rink near Dublin was destroyed.
Northern Ireland and Scotland are also on high alert and joined Ireland in closing schools and cancelling trains, flights and ferries.
Northern Ireland’s First Minister Michelle O’Neill warned there was a “genuine threat to life and property”, saying the region was “in the eye of the storm”.
A top-level red warning for wind covering Northern Ireland was in force from at 7:00 am (0700 GMT) to 2pm.
Dublin Airport announced more than 110 scheduled departures and 110 arrivals had been cancelled by airlines for Friday, although the first flight took off at around 0930 GMT as winds eased.
As the storm moved northwards, hundreds of flights were cancelled at airports including Belfast in Northern Ireland and Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow in Scotland.
Wind speeds of up to 149 kilometres per hour were recorded in Gwynedd in north Wales, the British Met Office forecaster said.
The strongest gust ever recorded in the UK is 228 kilometres per hour at Fraserburgh in eastern Scotland, on February 13, 1989.
Irish forecaster Met Eireann said on X the previous record in Ireland was 182 kilometres per hour recorded in 1945. O’Neill urged people to heed warnings and stay at home if possible.
‘Dangerous and destructive’
“We’re asking the public to be very safe, to be very cautious, to take every precaution to ensure that they don’t take any unnecessary travel, please just stay at home if you can,” she told BBC radio. “We’re in the eye of the storm now. We are in the period of the red alert.”
The chairman of Ireland’s National Emergency Co-ordination Group, Keith Leonard, said Storm Eowyn was likely to be one of the most severe storms the country had seen. “It is going to be a damaging, dangerous and destructive weather event,” he said.
“The forecasted winds will bring severe conditions which will constitute a risk to life and property. “Our most important message today is that everybody needs to shelter in place for the duration of all red warnings.”
In Ireland, 715,000 homes and businesses were without power while in Northern Ireland, over 93,000 had been hit by outages, electricity suppliers said.
Northern Ireland Electricity Networks said Storm Eowyn was causing “widespread damage” to the electricity network, warning that repair work would not begin immediately due to safety concerns.
“We anticipate we will begin assessing the damage to the network after 2:00 pm once the red weather warning has been lifted,” it said in a statement.
In Scotland hundreds of school were closed and train operator ScotRail suspended all services. Many rail routes in northern England were also suspended.
A red warning was in place for western and central areas of Scotland between 1000 GMT and 1700 GMT.
Britain’s environment agency warned of flooding in southern and central England over the coming days.
Ahead of the storm, some 4.5 million people on Thursday received emergency alerts on their phones, the “largest real-life use of the tool to date” on Thursday, the UK government said.
Scientists have shown that climate change caused by humans burning fossil fuels is making storms more severe, super-charged by warmer oceans.
Storms, however, are natural phenomena and to date no scientific attribution to climate change has been made for this storm.
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