Storm Babet - Oct 17th 2023

Ye syran should get a Job with met eirrean he knows wayyyy more than anyone in this and themselves in met eirrean , sryan knows his stuff big time and I'm not saying that to sound sarcastic or anything I'm quite serious

Monsoon like conditions, never seen anything even close to it since or before :)

Haha that's a good question to which the answer is below.

Fascinating story, I love those old quirky ones. Thanks for sharing.

Wasn't that Storm Frank in December 2015?

Dublin, wicklow and wexford in a yellow till 05:00

A lot of flooding around Arklow now

Manhole tops lifted,Golf course is a lake

I've been sent a WhatsApp of that with roads like rivers but cannot share because there's people talking in it

I've recorded 48.4mm so far

15km radius??? Midleton got the brunt of the widepsread flooding but there's roads virtually impassable throughout an area much bigger than 15km.....

The Straight Road Cork city, starts at the county hall and out to ballincollig - straight :D

In the West Claremorris and Knock have had 35mm of rain in past 24 hours. This would be a lot if Cork hadn't 100mm. Actually it is a lot. In Sligo we have seen 24mm in the 2 days but still raining for next 14 hours at least so 40mm plus from this thing before showery rain.

Wow .. hope all were ok

Garryvoe got flooded even.

East Cork, Midleton especially very bad also Glanmire

This is the issue

No matter how many stations you have,you're getting just a broad measure and will miss extremes that may be higher locally than recorded at the nearest station

Whilst if these floods happened in Dublin but without a red,the very fact a million plus people would have been impacted,Glasnevin would have had to endure much more criticism

Their defence on morning ireland was that parts of Cork only had yellow level rain amounts

If ever there was a justification for applying warnings to areas of counties,this is a reason to do so

Meanwhile still some showery rain in Arklow this morning and a lot of surface flooding

Total for the episode here 71mm

Month total gone up to 115mm

Total in Sligo for Babet is now 44mm after 24mm has fallen in the past 12 or so hours.

Monthly total still only 72mm as apart from this and last Friday wev only had 13mm

That must of been a scary hour for you,thank god everything worked out OK and just shows how easily something can go wrong and a life lost

Honestly , local councils areas should have a flood alert system , possibly colour coded for expected severity ,taking into account rainfall/tidal conditions time of the year ect - so if midleton gives a yellow warning ,people at distillery end of main street know to beware ( small floods several times a year ..i think the council already gives a heads up to these businesses) ,

The post mortem, the questions

One of the replies to that tweet:

"Bad weather will happen. Given the flooding was to one specific area rather than widespread, this looks like a local infrastructure issue primarily!"

Amazing how flipant people can be. And also ill informed and then from there making wide sweeping statements w/o first hand knowledge. Smacks of arrogance also

This "specific area" comment is wholly down to media coverage of this I imagine. RTE straight away have latched onto midleton and then imply that East Cork, a few towns there is where the action was and no where else

We made LBC:

But is that response really flippant?

It's the lack of adaptation that's biting in these areas. Yesterday there was a video doing the rounds of a small mini-digger cutting a wider trench across a road to relieve the water. Why are the rivers and culverts not being cleared so when the heavy rains arrive the excess water can quickly get to sea. How many storm drains on the roads yesterday are chocked with gunk and leaves?

In fairness now, the governments of many shades have been only too delighted to cream huge amounts of money in the form of carbon taxes for nearly two decades now and very little has been spent. If pointing this out is 'flippant' then it gives the authorities carte blanche to continue as is and nothing will get done - so expect further flooding events and leave it to insurance companies to pay for the clean up costs each time.

Then we'll moan about the gouging insurance companies in due course.

Carlow Weather was on radio a few weeks back and was demonised for pointing out that much much more needs to be spent on adaptation and that we need a proper flood alert system. One of the high horses of the green movement lambasted him. And look at what happened just a few weeks later.

If everyone in Ireland was zero emissions from tomorrow onwards, we are still going to get weather events such as yesterday - so all the spending on mitigation isn't worth a dime if emissions continue to grow elsewhere in the world. It's days like yesterday that drive that message home to any logical thinking person. Yet a green councillor Liam Quaide in Cork tweeted yesterday "Climate change is here. Absolutely vital that we double down on mitigation & adaptation." Talk about gaslighting people. Same cabal of councillors have down through the years stalled any meaningful works to protect properties built on flood plains.