The Red Alert was correct. And yet late last night the ordinary forecasts for Bordeaux and Biarritz were still talking about 50Km/hour gusts.
Around 8:00 this morning, an all-time record gust of 159Km/hour was recorded at Cap Ferret, just south of Bordeaux, and even mainline trains stayed put in Bordeaux station. About 500,000 homes in Aquitaine lost electrical power. The storm is making its way across the Pyrenees on both sides, but particularly along southwest France, with winds only slightly weaker over the land – Pau has had 130Km/hour gusts – and will intensify as it hits the Mediterranean. Corsica and Sardinia are expecting wave and wind damage in due course.
This storm, similar in intensity to the French storm of 1999 but confined to a narrower band of the country, is believed to be driven by a Sting Jet – a phenomenon defined by UK meteorologists after studying the 1987 storm. A stream of cold, dry air descends in a curve like a scorpion’s tail from the troposphere, adding energy to the cyclone at ground level.
I have tried watching the webcams around Biarritz, but they are unavailable – possibly because of server overload as everyone else tries to do the same thing, or because of the power cuts.
