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James Bream: Awful Arwen proved few are better or braver than north-easters

Storm Arwen left a great deal of damage behind (Photo: Kenny Elrick/DCT Media)
Storm Arwen left a great deal of damage behind (Photo: Kenny Elrick/DCT Media)

The old adage is that British folk love to talk about the weather.

Well, there is nothing to love about this last week for most of us, and surely nothing good to talk about either.

Personally, I got lucky – some guttering and minor damage and a couple of days without power, but we were away anyway. However, the impact on the north-east is quite unfathomable, really.

Our local Aden Park is wrecked with (I believe) hundreds of trees down, some over 200 years old. You can say it’s just a tree and this is nature taking its course, but there are so many memories, pictures and people that some of these things have touched.

There are stories which are associated with these old beasts, and now they are gone. The physical movement of timber might take a year but the landscape will have changed forever.

The impact of Arwen was devastating

Buildings are wrecked, from Kebab shops in Peterhead to the Heritage Centre in Fraserburgh. The impact on the volunteers at the latter is hard to comprehend, too. These attractions take years to pull together and, overnight, their work was destroyed, the roof eventually laying in a neighbouring fish factory’s yard.

Then there is the human impact; families with no power or water living in freezing temperatures for over a week, children forced to take time off school, and people either in properties that are not safe to live in or pushed out of their homes to stay somewhere warm.

Many homes lost power during the storm (Photo: SSEN)

The cost of these situations are often quantified by the media using values of insurance losses. However, this time I genuinely feel it is impossible to capture all of the impacts arising from Storm Arwen. The winds hit the north-east hard, it hurt us and it will leave a lasting memory, for sure.

One surprising thing for me is the lack of knowledge of what has happened here, outside the area. I genuinely don’t think people knew or know how bad it has been. I am not convinced the response has been quick enough or large enough.

I don’t think much more could be done by the electricity networks. Seeing the impact of line damage, the volume is clearly overwhelming. However, it feels like this should have been categorised as a disaster or emergency of some sort much sooner.

Finding joy during hard times

It has been a pretty heavy week with the weather and Omicron chat, too. In fact, it would be easy to be doom and gloom with all of this happening, but I think folk around the north-east are very resilient.

You hear about people helping each other, hotels offering beds, support with clearances from farmers, who’ll no doubt spot a wee business opportunity too. There is definitely a toughness about folk from up here that sets us apart.

With all that misery, I wanted to find some joy and, unexpectedly, I discovered it on the Traffic Scotland website. I am loving the gritter names; my personal favourite is Gritney Spears.

Scotland’s gritters have some unusual names (Photo: DCT Media)

The other piece of joy is goading my kids. I cannot tell you how fun it was reminding them that radiators are a new thing and that we used to get dressed under the covers every day. Life was awful in the olden days, wasn’t it? Can someone tell me at when 2021 will become the olden days, and fibre broadband and 4k digital streaming will be considered rubbish?

Equally amusing was spotting a letter in the P&J’s pages written by an older friend of mine (and a regular contributor), singing the praises of his coal fire. I know this is going to make me look bad, but only a proper north-easter could be so delighted by the joys of fossil fuels.

So, who are like us? In my eyes, few are better, braver and stronger than the people in the north-east.


James Bream is general manager of Aberdeen-based Katoni Engineering and chair of DYW North East

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