The Burns' Day Storm (also known as Cyclone Daria) was an extremely violent windstorm that took place on Thursday–Friday 25–26 January 1990 over North-Western Europe. It is one of the strongest European windstorms on record and caused many fatalities, approximately one hundred deaths, with almost half of these on the British Isles alone. The storm caused widespread damage and hurricane-force winds over a wide area.
This storm has received different names, as there was no official list of such events in Europe at the time, although in Britain it was named so as it occurred on 'Burns Day', the birthday of the Scottish poet Robert Burns.
Meteorological history
The storm began as a cold front over the Northern Atlantic Ocean on 23 January. By 24 January, it had a minimum central pressure of and began to undergo explosive cyclogenesis, which was sometimes referred to as a weather bomb. It made landfall on the morning of 25 January over Ireland. It then tracked over to Ayrshire in Scotland. The lowest pressure of was estimated near Edinburgh around 16:00. After hitting the United Kingdom, the storm tracked rapidly east towards Denmark causing major damage and a further 30 deaths in the Netherlands and Belgium. The model forecast hinged on observations from two ships in the Atlantic near the developing storm the day before it reached the UK.
During the day of the storm, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) increased warnings to force 11 and eventually to hurricane force 12. It conducted research that showed that most of the general public could not understand the severity of the warnings. The storm has led to more awareness and understanding of storminess among the public by the KNMI, which started a teletext page and the introduction of special warnings for extreme weather events in reaction to these findings.
Impacts
thumb|Destruction caused by the storm in [[IJmuiden, Netherlands]]
Casualties were much higher than those of the Great Storm of 1987 because the storm hit during the daytime. There were 47 deaths in the UK, most caused by collapsing buildings or falling debris. A schoolgirl was killed by a falling tree at Presdales School in Ware, Hertfordshire, and a class of children in Sussex was evacuated just minutes before their school building collapsed. The actor Gorden Kaye was injured during the storm when a plank of an advertising board was blown through his car's windscreen, and Kaye required emergency brain surgery to recover. The storm caused extensive damage, with approximately 3 million trees downed, power disrupted to over 500,000 homes and severe flooding in England and West Germany. The storm cost insurers in the UK £3.37 billion, the UK's most expensive weather event to insurers.
Highest wind gust per country
{| class="wikitable sortable"
|-
! Country
! Highest Gust
! Location
|-
|
| 168 km/h
| Dunmore Head
|-
|
| 172 km/h
| Aberporth & Gwennap Head
|-
|
| 164 km/h
| Sangatte
|-
|
| 168 km/h
| Beauvechain
|-
|
| 162 km/h
| Wincrange
|-
|
| 159 km/h
| IJmuiden & Westkapelle
|-
|
| 230 km/h
| Brocken
|-
|
| 166 km/h
| Gedser Odde & Nykøbing Falster
|}
See also
- Vivian (storm) 25–28 February 1990, later Wiebke. This is called the 1990 storm series.
- List of natural disasters in Great Britain and Ireland
References
External links
- On this Day by the BBC