Inhabitants of this island are no strangers to strong winds and rain. But every so often an event quite out of the ordinary occurs, a storm of such ferocity that it becomes enshrined in the annals of our climatology. Today is the anniversary of two such storms.
The first was a major rainstorm on August 25th, 1905. Its focus was on Bray, Co Wicklow, where the resultant flooding necessitated the evacuation of over 1,000 people from their homes. The gauge at Bray Garda station recorded 113 mm of rain that day, and 85 mm were measured in Dublin city centre.
Then 12 years ago today we felt the wrath of Hurricane Charley. Despite winds which sometimes howl at hurricane force, or Force 12 on the Beaufort Scale, hurricanes, in the strictest scientific sense, do not occur at these latitudes. A proper hurricane needs a warm and humid ambience to survive, and once it moves northwards over the colder waters of the North Atlantic, it quickly dissipates.
We do from time to time, however, experience very severe, albeit conventional, North Atlantic depressions, into which a hurricane has been subsumed, and which in the popular parlance is still referred to by the name of the tropical storm in which it may have had its origins.
This was the case with Charley. It formed as a hurricane some 30 miles off the coast of South Carolina on August 15th, 1986. As it moved along the eastern seaboard of the United States, the winds over land were strong but not unusual, and the heavy rain it brought was welcome in the drought-stricken areas of North Carolina and Virginia.
By August 19th, Charley, by now officially no longer classified as a hurricane, was moving eastwards over the Atlantic.
It took the storm five days to make the crossing. By the early hours of Sunday, August 25th, it appeared as a rapidly deepening depression about 300 miles to the south-west of Kerry, and as it began to cross the country it was evident that its character remained unchanged.
The winds, as had been the case across the Atlantic, were not exceptional - but the rainfall was: it poured down in unprecedented quantities on southern and eastern parts of Ireland, breaking long-established records and leaving widespread flooding in its wake.
Two hundred millimetres of rain were deposited on Kilcoole in Co Wicklow, and 24-hour totals of 70 to 100 mm were commonplace that day over large areas of that county and the adjoining parts of Co Dublin. In Ballsbridge and Sandymount, more than 400 houses were flooded when the Dodder overflowed its banks.