1987: THE GREAT STORM RELIVED


The ‘worst storm in living memory’ touched down in Kent 30 years ago this month. Dawn Kingsford looks back at the natural disaster that has changed our landscape and our thinking ever since...


Between 2am and 6am on October 16, 1987, hurricane winds whipped across Kent, devastating homes, changing lives and our landscape. The Great Storm, as it came to be


known, followed a day of light winds and an assurance from forecaster Michael Fish that the gales would track along the English Channel. Instead, the violent extratropical cyclone blasted 110mph winds across Kent. At 23, living in an exposed farmhouse


STORM FACTS


• Hundreds of thousands were left without power, some for more than a fortnight • 1.3 million incidents of damage were reported • Sealink ferry the Hengist was blown ashore in Folkestone • Two fishermen were killed in Dover Harbour • Wild boar that escaped in the storm established populations across the south


28 Mid Kent Living


near Maidstone, I remember waking, shrugging off a “blustery night”, far from prepared for the chaos caused. Heavy flower pots whisked away to Neverland, a missing deckchair that never materialised and as I ventured further, a dozen elms on their side in the road, no power, no water and, inevitably, the jokes, Sevenoaks, or “one-oak”, I remember, after six of its seven eponymous oaks were laid waste.


COUNTING THE COSTS It was the TV — for those that could receive it — that brought perspective to the scale of the meteorological mayhem - costing the lives of five people in Kent


Images © National Trust - Top - A tree at Chartwell split in two by the storm; Inset - Spring 1988. bluebells emerge in the light left by the casualties of the Great Storm at Emmetts; Bottom left - Storm damage at Emmetts Garden


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