Storm Babet - Oct 17th 2023

A lot of the comments elsewhere are conflating this with Cork City centre low lying areas and tidal flooding. Many of the areas that have flooded aren’t tidal, and aren’t necessarily even low lying. There’s absolutely enormous damage in Glanmire for example.

It’s entirely surface water being completely overwhelming the drains, both manmade plumbing and natural waterways.

It also seems to have been extremely localised. A few km away in the city it was wet and there was some random minor flooding from surface water, but nothing horrendous.

They need more granularity than “county cork” on the warnings though.

Also risk to life seemed relatively low compared to an extreme wind event. It was hugely disruptive and damaging to property due to getting everything water sodden and muddy and even sewage sodden but it’s nothing like the risks with flying debris and falling trees etc.

I ’m not convinced that you could have done much to predict this unless you’d local weather radar like they use in tornado impacted areas.

That dump of rain was confined to about 15km radius and it was very random. You would struggle to forecast much more than bursts could be possible.

Having driven around tonight, it’s localised spots and very localised at that. There isn’t widespread flooding around the city. There’s some surface water and that’s about it.

Glanmire is looking like a natural disaster zone and so is Midleton. It was a system with rain localised random rain bursts.

If you’d shut county cork today what exactly would it have achieved? It’s a big chuck of economic activity stopped. It has knock on impacts for all sorts of stuff, including healthcare etc.

Many of the places hit are very residential. So it’s not like people working from home would be any less likely to face disruption.

The majority of the well over half a million people who live in Cork were very mildly impacted and mostly just inconvenienced by traffic jams.

The severe flooding is highly localised.

There will be more because of swollen rivers over the next 24-48hours and that’s more predictable.

I think Met Eireann is dammed if it does and damned if it doesn’t issue red alerts. Orange with localised flood warnings seems very accurate given the conditions.

There isn’t really any way they could model well enough to give you precise locations of those downpours.

A wide spread severe storm like Ophelia is a different scenario entirely and needed people to take shelter and not drive.

The UK's Met Office has issued a rare red warning for the Aberdeenshire area of Eastern Scotland for Thursday going into Friday. Saying that up to 250mm of rain could fall. An extraodinary total if it happens.