weathering storms
in the Atlantic isles (Ireland & Great Britain), storms generally approach from the south-west and move towards the north-east. A current — AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation — drives the movement of the ocean, & its weather, up from the equatorial Atlantic & Caribbean, north along the coast of Turtle Island, and then north-east where it collides with the west of Ireland and Scotland. The west side therefore becomes the wet side.
trees adapt dynamically to the conditions they grow in. If the wind typically blows the same way, they grow thick as needed, grow tension or compression into their wood, and jettison branches. They become buttressed against the wind they are subjected to.
a storm throws trees when its angle of attack is a break from a pattern.
...
Storm Éowyn was a cyclone that made landfall in Ireland in January of 2025. It came from the west, as storms tend to. It did cause destruction, absolutely, with power and water cut off to many in Ireland ... but had Éowyn approached from an atypical direction, it would have been much worse.
( image: a thrown tree in Bangor. )
many of the trees that fell were isolated creatures, stripped of any surrounding foliage that might have shielded them. They were park-trees, garden-trees. Trees that were growing solitarily when they usually would not.
so while the direction of Éowyn was not unusual, many of its tree-victims were in unusual circumstances nonetheless.
a storm also throws trees that have been displaced, left to fend for themselves.
...
trees, of course, weren't the only things thrown by the storm. The governments and meteorological bodies of the Atlantic isles issued weather warnings for threat to life (a tragedy which, sorrowfully, came to pass). The threat was primarily things falling onto people, trees but also slate roof-tiles, satellite dishes, fences, and others. Things did fall, certainly, and many more people would have been injured if not for the forewarning.
when it comes to built-things (as opposed to grown-things), there is a noticeable pattern emerging in many cases, where the wind was not the most severe and many buildings remained staunch.
older buildings, pre-1900s, were fine. The damage in these cases were mostly the electrics and satellite dishes, which had been awkwardly pinned to the outside of the stone buildings that hadn't been designed to fit them. In the grand scheme of things, minimal.
...more recent buildings, in contrast...
( image: a roof fell off a building in Scotland. )
( image: part of the wall fell off a different building, also in Scotland. )
many of these homes were built to satisfy the condition of being a livable home without necessarily being reliably livable — they were made to house a statistic, to make the number-of-homes go up, which is admirable at least. But many of them haven't been maintained even slightly appropriately, with many tenants dealing with roof-holes, window-leaks, and dubious plumbing-wiring tangles. They were allowed to become dangerous, risk-of-falling-apart, because in many cases the tenants inside were numbers-in-ledgers of landlords or councils instead of people. And so the storm came along a predictable path, and the homes crumpled.
storms tear things apart when long-term solutions are left to languish, forcing the short-term solutions to become the only solutions.
and
storms tear things apart when you quantify people as statistics-only.
and
I doubt
that's all.
...
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