Britain’s Famous Forecasting Failure
The Great Storm of 1987 was a forecasting blunder that left at least 18 people dead, felled 15 million trees and caused a billion pounds’ worth of damage.
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Nazaneen Ghaffar is a London-based reporter on The Times’s weather team.
“Are you going to resign?” read the words, scrawled on a scrap of paper and pushed through the letterbox of a quiet London house.
Outside, reporters had gathered, demanding answers from one of Britain’s best-known weather forecasters, Michael Fish, who only the day before had reassured viewers that a hurricane wasn’t going to hit Britain.
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Inside, his 11-year-old daughter, Nicola, bent down to collect the note.
“I remember just finding that really shocking,” she recalled recently, sitting on a sofa beside her father, in the same home where the message had landed 38 years ago. “Really, really shocking.”
It was Oct. 16, 1987. By dawn, southern Britain’s landscape was unrecognizable. Overnight, the country had been hit by its fiercest storm in more than 300 years. Winds howled at over 100 miles per hour, ripping through homes and countryside, felling an astonishing 15 million trees and tearing down telephone and electricity lines. At least 18 people were killed and damage reached over a billion pounds. The southeast of England, including London, bore the brunt of the devastation.
But it wasn’t only the destruction that shocked the nation. It was the fact that almost no one — not even Britain’s trusted weather forecasters — had seen it coming.
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