Huge North Sea storm threatens England and the Netherlands with serious flooding
A massive fall storm over Europe's North Sea is generating winds near hurricane force that is expected to push a dangerous storm surge over 3 meters (10 feet) in height to the coast Friday morning. The storm is being compared to the great North Sea Flood of 1953 that pushed a 5.6 meter storm surge that breached the dikes in the Netherlands. Over 2,000 people died in northern Europe in that storm, mostly in the Netherlands. While today's storm will not approach the 1953 storm in severity, the storm may generate a once in 20 years type of flooding event. Thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate in the United Kingdom, and the massive flood gates that protect the Dutch port of Rotterdam are being closed for the first time since they were constructed in the 1990s. The worst of the storm surge is expected to hit the Netherlands near 7am local time Friday.
Figure 1. Visible satellite image of Europe from 1322 GMT November 8, 2007. A powerful low pressure system centered north of England ("L" on the image) was pushing a strong cold front southwards towards Western Europe. Image credit: University of Bern, Switzerland.
Oil platform 62114 in the North Sea off the coast of Scotland reported sustained winds of 55 knots (64 mph) at 2pm local time, and seas up to 26 feet were observed at oil platform 63110. An oil platform close to the coast of the Netherlands (62145) reported winds of 40 mph with 16 foot waves this evening. The latest QuikSCAT pass this evening showed a large area of winds over 50 knots in the North Sea. These winds are pushing a strong cold front southwards over Western Europe (Figure 1).
Figure 2. Forecast waves heights at 6am Greenwich time, Friday November 9, 2007, as predicted by NOAA's Wavewatch III model.
I'll have an update on the storm Friday morning.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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Patrap, thanks alot for the information about the levee systems. I didn't know either that NO and Rotterdam cooperate on that field.
Conditions have slightly improved here in the last 10 min, so I better take advantage of that and leave now. I've been waiting some hours for the winds to die down before I go out.
BBL
I think our biggest problem is buracracy. When I hear about other countries taking on massive projects for the benifit of thier countries it seems everything is to the highest quality and caliber and done right. Here we seem more concerned with time scheduals and more importantly budgets. We can spend billions on pet projects that only help lobbiests and constiuants but when it comes to safty issues noone opens the pocket book. DOT projects are well overneeded so are levee projects and many many others.
9th Ward rupture due to seepage, it says
Link
I take your point about large cities (megalopolises) the size of NYC, Detriot etc. Yep there are only three of this size in Europe (London, Paris, Moscow) as compared with 5 in N America (NYC,LA, Chicago, Detriot and Mexico City). However, on the bureaucracy front I would have to disagree. We British think we are the most bureaucratic nation on Earth, however, my wife is German and they give us a good run for our money!
I think the issue is with large cities dominating areas (countries) and getting the lion's share of the funds. For instance, London has a barrier and receives lots of infrastructure investment whereas other parts of the UK do not. Only London has a subway system for instance (Glasgow and Newcastle upon Tyne don't really count) yet there are many other very large cities,such as Manchester, Burmingham, Sheffield that have none. France suffers similarly.
Germany on the other hand has no single,large dominant city: Berlin is less than 4m. This means that many cities compete evenly for central government investment and,to use the example of subways, many cities have built them,including Frankfurt, Berlin, Munich and Stuttgart (all smaller that Birmingham).
The Netherlands is a small country (relatively in a European sense) but here its capital is not its largest city. I wonder does this make a difference?
Well noted, however here in the west of The Netherlands the larger cities are very close together and get more or less connected over time (it's hard to see real continious countryside travelling the highways between the cities) . The general slang for the area between Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and The Hague is alraedy referred to as the 'Ring-City' and more plans are in development to govern this area as a sort of connected Mega city. Our biggest problem in this evaluation is adjusting the infra structure.
Not quite as litigious as that over here but this does seem familiar :-)
This week they re-opened St Pancras Station in London as the new Channel Tunnel rail-link terminal. This is about 15 years late and cost billions. The French had theirs to Paris up and running the day the tunnel opened. You see what I mean.
Incidentally, when they built the tunnel the Government justified the cost of the scheme by telling taxpayers that there would be direct trains from all over the UK to Paris and Brussels and even Germany.I lived in Glasgow, Scotland at the time, a long way from the tunnel. How many direct trains from Glasgow, Scotland or anywhere else in the UK outside London (excluding Kent) have ever run since the tunnel opened? You guessed it, none!
To return to the weather theme, one good thing about the tunnel is that it is weatherproof: storm surges, waves and wind do not affect it.
sloooooooooow day
We had a bridge collapse in August here and for about a week the only talk was about fixing the road infastructure. Reports were done and everything then the last we heard there isnt enough money in the budgets to do all the repairs, so local governments asked for a bond program or other stipened to ofset the costs. Everyone was up in arms about it. So now we dont talk about the infastructure anymore. Its probably the same everywhere in every country the only diffrence is other countries do things then worry about public opinion here they worry about public opinion before deciding projects.
Its probably the same everywhere in every country the only diffrence is other countries do things then worry about public opinion here they worry about public opinion before deciding projects.
Catch 22.....
Update: checked cost on rail link $10.5bn
Could buy a lot of healthcare for that.
10.5B for a rail link, here you would be lucky to get 1.5 million.
dont even start with us over healthcare :( Thats a huge stick point over here.
Yeah,I know. We have the National Health Service (NHS) but,if you ask me,it is on the way out. The Government no longer wants to pay the cost of it and it is suffering death by a thousand cuts..
Enough heathcare then..
Looks like we escaped the worst of this storm by the skin of our teeth - thank God.
I think that Governments rely on this 'skin of teeth' measure too often. Think about it: how many close shaves do you have driving your car before you finally end up in an RTA? The Gov't knows that there will be lots of close shaves and hopes (probably reasonably) that the chances of something going seriously FUBAR while they are in office is pretty small and so hold their breath, then Katrina happens and they act surprised.
I guess most democratic countries suffer from buracracy. We for example have half a highway laying in the centre of the country which is waiting to be completed for a couple of decades now! Another highly needed highway connection was delayed many many years as the green movement claimed the area was vital for some kind of small animal, I believe it was some kind of squirl.
Here's another one that makes you thinking.
As the storm was approaching over the last days a large amount of containers with bananas washed ashore on 1 of the northern islands. What to do with the bananas? They cannot be used anymore for human consumption (not according the locals who will have bananas for their main meal for the next week). The initiative was to ship them to the zoos for the animals what seems to make sence. Then the taxes agency reacted that import duties needed to be paid!! Rule is rule!! now a small part of the bananas go to a certain zoo but the major part must be destroyed!?!
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