All of us who write and read SeaMagic love the sea, but not everyone loves a storm, especially when you get a whole bunch of them in a row. Recent storms and coastal floods in Britain and Ireland have made for a sobering start to 2014. Intermittently before Christmas sea and air travel was disrupted by storms and wet weather. But this was minor compared to what was to follow.
It’s not possible to ignore the sea when it is pounding on your window like it did on seafront properties at Aberystwyth University. The university asked students who had not yet returned after the Christmas break to stay away. In Devon the coast has also been battered, and a teenage photography student went missing on 2 January after taking a walk along the coast path to photograph storm waves near his family home.The area has been scoured for days with no sign of him. On Saturday in Aberystwyth harbour a 21-year old became trapped by waves while photographing the storm from a wooden jetty, and had to be rescued by the local lifeboat.
Over in the west of Ireland the coastline itself shows that erosion is a fact of life – but it’s rare to hear that in one week, Galway’s Spanish Arch was under several inches of water, cars were swept off the pier at Inishbofin ferry docks, Cork city had repeated low-level flooding, a sink hole opened on Tramore’s Strand Road and graves in Connemara were broken open by the sea. There have been other accidents, rescues, and near misses, this is not an attempt at a comprehensive list.
Video footage of the damage at Aber saddened me, but it was reassuring, in this BBC article, to note the old Pathé news clip from 1938.
It’s not the first time the sea has a serious go at the the lovely Aberystwyth seafront promenade, and last time people fixed it up. The contrast between photos of then and now is striking. The black and white images from 1938, filled with people working to repair the damage; the colour ones from 2014, filled with bemused sightseers photographing each other.
It is Monday 6 January, the traditional last day of Christmas, hours before another high tide and wave swell is due at Aberystwyth. I hope they get through it OK. And I wonder if tomorrow camera-people from local crime series Hinterland will be out harvesting the detritus for their second series.
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