By Philip Eden
One of Scotland's worst natural disasters of the 20th century happened 40 years ago this month. During the early hours of January 15, 1968, a short-lived but violent gale swept central and southern parts of the country, also affecting much of northern England and Northern Ireland. The depression responsible for the disaster seemed to come out of nowhere. Two days before it was the merest ripple on a trailing cold front near Bermuda, and even on the day before the gale it was a shallow, innocuous-looking feature just to the northwest of the Azores. Within 24 hours, though, it had deepened by 50 millibars, sweeping across northern Scotland with a central pressure of 956 millibars.
Clydeside was particularly badly hit; in and around Glasgow twenty people were killed and a further forty were injured, mostly in their own homes as chimney stacks were toppled, roofs caved in, and load-bearing walls collapsed. In all, over 1000 houses in the city of Glasgow alone were damaged, over fifty of which had to be demolished, and 650 people were forced into temporary accommodation. There was also a good deal of damage in neighbouring local authorities such as Paisley, Renfrew and Clydebank.
Thousands of mature trees in the Central Lowlands of Scotland were uprooted or snapped off, and high-tension power cables across the River Clyde snapped resulting in a closure of the waterway to marine traffic for two days. Off the east coast of Scotland, the drilling rig, [IT]Sea Quest[RO], lost all anchors and was set adrift in very rough seas.
At Glasgow airport the wind averaged 61mph during the hour between 2am and 3am, with a peak gust of 102mph at 2.55am. On the Ayrshire coast, Prestwick airport reported a gust of 104mph, while in the Hebrides, the island of Tiree recorded an hourly average of 77mph and a gust of 117mph. Even higher figures were reported from mountain-top weather stations in the Southern Uplands, the Isle of Man, and the northern Pennines, including a gust of 133mph on the summit of Great Dun Fell in Cumbria.
This was the worst gale ever recorded in the UK in terms of losses to the residential housing stock, partly a consequence of the poor quality and inadequate maintenance of many tenement buildings in the city of Glasgow. After the devastation of January 1968, the city council promptly actioned a policy to improve housing throughout Glasgow.
© Philip Eden