The devastation from Storm Darragh is not yet over as strong winds continue to blow across the UK Extreme weather

James Woodbine was woken up by Storm Darragh at 5am, around the time the blackout began. His 300-year-old cottage sits at the top of a hill in Trofarth in North Wales, where winds were at their fiercest yesterday, measured at 150km/h, near Capel Curig.

“The noise was the strangest thing,” Woodbine said. “There was a rumbling noise coming from the ground, and with every gust a rumbling sound went through the building. I’ve never heard that before. I’ve been here for 30 years and in 2017 we experienced Storm Doris. But that’s much worse. I’ve never seen a storm like this.”

Woodbine is one of hundreds of thousands of people across the UK and Ireland affected by Storm Darragh, which was so severe that the Met Office issued a red wind warning to warn people of the danger to life – only the 19th since 2011.

A man in his 40s died after a tree fell on his van as it drove along a dual carriageway section of the A59 in Longton, near Preston. Another man died when a tree fell and hit his car in Birmingham yesterday afternoon. At 3am, as winds intensified, a Translink airport express bus veered off the road and crashed into a wall near Antrim in Northern Ireland. The driver was taken to hospital.

The government stepped up the warning with a siren alert sent to 3 million phones in Wales and southwest England on Friday evening, and on Saturday Dyfed-Powys Police declared a serious one due to the volume of calls about uprooted trees and other dangers Incident.

When the wind died down, it rained heavily. Natural Resources Wales issued 27 flood warnings and there were 17 more in England. There were also more than 200 flood warnings with flooding possible. In Scotland, where a yellow warning was in place, there were warnings in the Borders and Tayside.

Most people avoided the streets, but some took risks. Woodbine, who runs Woody’s Glamping, a campsite in the foothills of Snowdonia, said a family with four children turned up unexpectedly and asked to stay in one of his tents. Instead, he put her in a safer cabin.

“My wife said to them, ‘There is a warning – please, if you go, you have to be very, very careful with it.'”

Traffic cameras showed mostly empty streets yesterday. Even the “road to hell” section of the M25 near Heathrow was comparatively quiet – according to Flightaware, a tracking service, the airport had suffered 83 cancellations as of Saturday afternoon, dozens more flights were canceled elsewhere and ferry crossings at Stranraer, the Western Isles, Holyhead and Fishguard also stopped. Network Rail listed 14 disruptions.

People who set out found few places to go in the worst-hit areas. Events were canceled and businesses remained closed after the storm knocked out power. According to the Energy Networks Association, 177,000 households across mainland Britain were without power yesterday afternoon, and its member networks’ online incident maps showed a sea of ​​dots stretching from Eastbourne on the south coast to Bamburgh in Northumberland.

London’s ten royal parks have been closed, including the Winter Wonderland attraction. The Merseyside derby between Everton and Liverpool has been postponed, while most rugby and football matches in Wales have been cancelled, as have football matches in Crawley, Bristol and Plymouth. People visiting some National Trust sites were turned away and local authorities closed recycling centres. Diss in Norfolk postponed the switching on of the Christmas lights.

The winds will ease, the Met Office said, but Darragh isn’t done yet. A yellow alert is in place across England and Wales on Sunday and Woodbine has been warned that power is unlikely to be restored any time soon.

“It will take 36 hours,” he said. “Normally a storm lasts about seven hours. We’re pretty exposed.” He could already see the damage from his rear window on Saturday afternoon.

“One of the glamping tents has a torn canvas roof. I have an old tree, a blackthorn, that was ripped out of the ground. The roof tiles fell off the roof. All our trash cans are gone. We have hot tub lids that I strapped down because I saw them fly away like frisbees. They hang on for their lives. But we still have 12 hours of that left.”