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The Day A Tornado Came to London
• Storm's impact felt across the capital
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By
Urban Cowgirl
Thursday,
7 December, 2006
It was Thursday 7th December 2006. I was at home in my first floor office in Twickenham in south west London typing away. It must have been around eleven in the morning. Suddenly I heard the crack and roll of thunder bolts and looked out of the window to see the sky darkening to the colour of rainwashed slate.
A tremedous angry crack of thunder shook the sky. My partner appeared round our office door carrying two cups of tea.
“What was that?”
“Sounds like a thunder storm is on the way”.
“Didn't sound like normal thunder to me and in any case we don’t have thunderstorms like that in December in London”.
“Well, it sounded like thunder to me."
“Perhaps it was an explosion?” (In London we are ever conscious of the threat of terrorist action).
“Nah, probably just thunder - stuck below Richmond Hill, rumbling around. Look at the sky”. We looked out of the window at the darkening sky which had now taken on an angry dark green irridescence.
The thunder rolled again and the sky darkened further.
“It sounds like it’s coming from the other direction, behind us."
We looked out of the window again, just in time to see a neon yellow bolt of lightening split the sky apart as it raced down to earth with a loud shriek. The wind rose and then the rain started, pattering at first, and then as dense sleet and hail. I peered out of the window to see the hail, whipped by the ferocious wind, barrelling horizontally along the street.
Overhead I heard a low angry roar, descending through the storm, like a jet engine coming in low to land at nearby Heathrow airport. Curious, I remember thinking, that a plane should be cleared to land at the airport during such a tremendous storm.
The shrieks of pedestrians, running to safety, filtered in through the windows. Our morning mail had arrived only a few minutes earlier and, concerned that our postwoman might be stranded in the street I ran downstairs to see if she needed shelter. The driving rain and sleet, sleet, now horizontal, was too heavy and dense to penetrate and the rattle of the hailstones was deafening. I just had to hope she was sheltering in a neighbour's porch.
Then just as suddenly as it had come the storm had pased, and the sun was breaking through. By midday the only sign of its ferocity were the pools of water left behind, steaming gently in the sun.
Yet only minutes after it left us, in Kensal Rise, a residential suburb in north west London, seven miles to the north west of our house, a tornado had touched down out of the midday darkness and wreaked a trail of damage, ripping the side off a house and leaving over one hundred homeowners homeless. Miraculously no one was killed. It was all over in minutes.
The next day I encountered my elderly neighbour in the street outside. We exchanged greetings and discussed the storm.
“We were lucky," he said, “fifty years ago a tornado came through very near here and did immense damage including tearing apart Gunnersbury station.”
As London expands, it has evolved its own micro-climate, hotter than the surrounding suburbs. Maybe we can expect more tornados in the capital in future.
That roar overhead I thought was a jet landing, it was the tornado. We were lucky, this time.
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