Jim Roberts on 1987 Storm
The great storm in 1987, the night of the hurricane, as it’s known was on the 15th-16th October. It’s currently etched in one’s memory that particular night. Just a little background, it all started because as far as I was concerned myself and my wife had been out with a friend in Shanklin and when we were driving back home about 10 or 11 o’clock in the evening we found … well I noticed that going along Sandown, the tide seemed to be extremely high and I mentioned to my wife this was the fact. She said, “Yeah, I’ve never seen it that high, ever.” Didn’t think anything more of it.
When we got back to Bembridge and going to back what I’d been describing earlier on, I had to actually phone up Solent Coastguard and say that I was back on call, because I’d been out of the village. And when I did, the Watch Manager over there said, “Oh, what’s your weather like over there Jim?” I said, “Oh it’s puffing up a bit, it’s not too bad, the only thing that I’d noticed was extremely high tide at Sandown as we came through.” He said, “Well, I’ve just had your opposite number from Newhaven phone up” he said “and he tells me it’s blowing force 9 there,” which is a severe gale, and he said, “and we haven’t had any inputs at all from anybody else, the weather forecast’s not saying it’s going to be too bad.” I said, “Oh, well let’s see what happens. Anyway, goodnight” and went off to bed.
The next thing I knew was that the phone rang and it was somewhere after half past one in the morning and I said … I was grappling round to find the phone because, as these things happen, my other half had moved the bedroom round at the time. Once I found the phone and answered it, the same guy was on the other end, and he said to me, “John Brockman here Jim, can you get down to Shanklin?” He said, “We’ve got a report of white flares off of Shanklin Pier” he said, “and we can’t identify what it is.” He said, “The wind’s picked up a bit” and he said, “we’ve already sent the Ventnor Mobile down there but Ventnor Mobile have been coming down out over Cowlease and they had a tree fall behind them, their Land Rover, and they’ve had a tree now fallen in front of them, they can’t go either way. Can you get down there and see what it is and then see if you can help out at the Mobile.” He said, “Oh, by the way be careful because the wind’s now force 11.” “What? yeah, UK right fine.”
Next thing is, where’s the bedside light – no electricity, so get out and find some clothes to put on in the dark, get out of the front door, going up our little path which was in Foreland Road here, and a gust of wind picked me up, slammed me against the gate, the gate come off the hinges and I ended up sitting on this iron gate on the pavement thinking ‘what’s happened’? So, I then looked down the road and I could see all sorts of blue flashing going on. I thought ‘Oh, is that lightning, oh I dunno.’
Anyway, got in the car, drove down the road and as I got close to it, I found that it was electricity cables all arcing together and even worse, still they were in the road, across the road. So, I thought ‘oh, what do I do here’? I thought ‘hmmmm, I’ve got rubber tyres, we’ll try a daredevil bit and go straight over it’, which I did and looked round and they were still arcing behind me after I went past them.
Got to the Coastguard Station; I also called out my colleague, No 2 on call who is John Hammond and he arrived a bit shaken as well. We discussed what we had to do very quickly. He said, “Well I think we ought to get some extra lighting” so we went round to the Coastguard Station because at that time the Coastguard Station was split up with a duty room, a garage and a lookout. And, we went round to the Coastguard Station.
At that point we had a look, we had a large flagpole on top of the Coastguard Station and that was going about 30 degrees either way in the wind. So, we got in there quickly, got the equipment we wanted round to the garage. When we got round to the garage, he … no I opened one of the garage doors and unfortunately the garage was facing into the direction of the storm. So, that garage door got ripped out of my hand and broke a hinge. And, we looked at each other and said, “Well, we’ll go for it, you stay here and open the other garage door, I’ll get inside the vehicle first”, because we knew the garage doors would blow away from us “and then we’ll see what happens then”.
Anyway, good that, started the thing, gave him the thumbs-up to open the other door, as he did so the wind caught it, pulled the garage door straight off onto the front of the vehicle and the roof of the garage disappeared. Luckily, he was upwind so he wasn’t injured at all. So, I thought, oh, the right thing to do here is put the vehicle in first, drive it forward and see what happens. And as I did all the debris just blew away; he jumped in and away we went. So, that was the start of the proceedings.
We then went to see if we could go to Sandown, we couldn’t get past Bembridge School or Steynewoods because there was trees down. We then decided we’ll go the other via St Helens. We couldn’t get up Station Road at St Helens, but we could get up Latimer Road.
As we got up there and went along the top of the Green there was a Fire Engine there which we recognised as the Bembridge one with quite a number of the firemen that we knew and all sort of shouted and waved at each other and they actually had a house there that the roof was lifting and they actually had a couple of lines over the roof of this house trying to secure it. So, we made appropriate gestures and went on.
We got ok, then we got into Sandown, but the next excitement was when we were going through … past Skew Bridge and then going into, to Shanklin along past which is Wiltons Garage now. On the left-hand side is the or was the Gatten and Lake Primary School and we saw instantly there was obviously a huge gust and the gable end came out of Gatten and Lake Primary School and the walls along the road on the other side all collapsed into the road.
Got a little bit further down and then it was a matter of ducking the dustbins because they were all coming down the road and being blown down the road but they were all quite airborne and they were actually going over the top of the Land Rover in the wind.
There was one of two places where we saw hedges which weren’t upright, they were actually laid, with the wind, actually on the ground. And there was also one other place where we also saw a garden shed go over the top of us as well. So, we then ended up going down onto Shanklin Esplanade.
When we got down the bottom and as we got there we thought ‘what’s all these … looked like railway sleepers on the beach in front of us’ and we turned the corner and went along. My colleague said, “Those aren’t railway sleepers” he said, “that’s all the wood that’s ripped off the Pier.” So, we went along there and yeah, by that time the whole area of the Pier, the walkway had all been stripped and blown onto the shore.
The problem was we immediately found out there was possibly two fishermen that he been out on the end of the Pier and we didn’t know whether they had got ashore or not. So, we had to try and ascertain what had happened there. We soon ascertained what the white flares were, they were actually electricity cables being torn apart on the Pier as the Pier was ripped apart. So, we then decided that we ought to go along and search all these sleepers on the beach because they were all piled on one another and just to make sure if the fishermen were out there, none of them were amongst the sleepers and we couldn’t find anybody, but a little bit later on we did find out that they had got home OK.
So that was the first part and we decided … at that point there was something else was starting to develop and also round about that time the Ventnor Coastguard Mobile had got itself free from Cowlease and they’d come down and joined us. They managed to pick up a chainsaw by this time from somewhere never did ask them where they got that from and we were both stood by because another incident was happening … south of St Catherine’s and we took shelter by Shanklin Sailing Club where you could get in underneath and most of the debris and stuff was blowing over the top of us at that point.
We couldn’t really do much more about the Pier until we got some daylight. When we were down at Shanklin seafront, by that time the mean wind speed had reached 86 miles an hour with gusts up to 108 miles an hour.
The hurricane actually developed in the Bay of Biscay and had moved towards the south coast of England causing around about 2 billion pounds worth of damage. The atmospheric pressure actually on the night, and we did actually get that confirmed by Southampton Weather Centre, at Bembridge was 959 millibars, which if you look at your barometers its nearly off the bottom of the scale.
And it was also the famous night where the weather forecaster at the Met Office, Michael Fish, got it wrong, because he said, “No, a woman had phoned up and said she thought there was a hurricane coming.” He said, “No madam there was no possible reason to think that.” And, in fact the way that the Met Office were caught out because we’ve got copies of the barograph from Southampton Met Office and the storm suddenly took a turn for the worse about eleven/ twelve o’clock that evening, but that’s another story.
At Shanklin, with the Mobile and we were waiting for some information and we found out that, or were told, that there was a Coaster putting out the distress message south of St Catherine’s Lighthouse and the Coaster’s name was the ‘Union Mars’. She had part of her bridge had been blown away and the Captain was using the emergency steering. Luckily, he did have a fair bit of sea room and he was using his best endeavours to see what he could do with his craft. And he was actually saying that, “Don’t send anybody out to my assistance, at this point, but I do want you to know that, you know, I’m quite severely damaged.”
At that point the Bembridge Lifeboat was put on full alert, but the crew must have been in the Boathouse at Bembridge but didn’t launch and the Coastguard didn’t want to send a single Lifeboat down there so decided to send Yarmouth Lifeboat as well. The Yarmouth Lifeboat was launched but it was decided she should come through the Solent via Cowes to Bembridge and anchor off Bembridge Lifeboat Station, and wait there and if the Lifeboats did go, they’d both go together from Bembridge.
The interesting part of this particular story is that everybody was saying, “Union Mars, that rings a bell” and it did in the Coastguard Maritime world and then we suddenly realised why and that was because the ‘Union Mars’ had a sister ship which was the ‘Union Star’ and the ‘Union Star’ was the Coaster that was involved in a serious incident. It was the incident of when the Penlee Lifeboat was capsized and the ‘Union Star’ drove on the Cornish coast and all the crew of the ‘Union Star’ and the Penlee Lifeboat were lost. That actually happened to the ‘Union Star’ because she actually ended up getting water in her fuel tanks and the engine stopped. But anyway, to continue the story off of St Catherine’s, the ‘Union Mars’, the sister ship, managed to actually change course, although it went round in quite a large circle and started to head up towards the Nab Tower which she eventually got up to the Nab Tower some hours later and the Yarmouth Lifeboat and the Bembridge Lifeboat continued to stand by until she managed to get herself into Spithead.
At that point it was … it had got light in Shanklin and the Coastguards, I think there was five of us on scene, and we then went all the way along the beach. I remember walking along all … on the top of all the bits of wood that had been blown up onto the shore at Shanklin just to check that there was nobody there, nothing untoward.
It took us an hour or so to walk over all this from our … one end…the bottom end of the … the road comes down onto the beach at Shanklin to actually the Pier itself. Looking out to the Pier the only bit that was actually left of it was just the inner end and the outer end and the entire walkway had been blown away and was deposited along the shore. So that was that.
Our day wasn’t complete at that point because we started to make our way back towards Bembridge. On making our way back towards Bembridge there was a further report of red flares in Sandown Bay and we were requested to go to a high point to see if we could observe anything. The high point we chose was Culver Down. When we drove up Culver Down past Bembridge Fort and suddenly a man jumped out in the road, we didn’t quite see where he’d come from but it looked like from behind a bush, and waved us down.
When we said to him, “You ok, what’s up?” he said, “No not really”, he said, “we’ve been sheltering” he said, “a couple of families”, we didn’t count them exactly, but it was at least 5 or 6 people there and they told us that they were the inhabitants of the Coastguard cottages at the end of the Down. They had actually vacated their properties when the hurricane came through and it blew all the windows in on the south side and the pressure was so immense that it blew all the windows out on the other side and sucked a lot of the contents of their house which we found out on the bank opposite and also the, I don’t think it was inhabited at the time, but the Culver Haven, which was the Pub on top of the Downs, that had suffered a similar fate where all the stuff out the bar and the optics and that were all strewn over down to the Bembridge Down.
Anyway. coming back to the 5 or 6 people, they said to us, “Oh, can we get … now you’ve come up, can we get back down because there was trees blocking the way up.” We said, “Oh yes, you can because we cut them up with the saw, that’s how we got up there.” So, they said, “Oh great, we’ll get our car.” We said, “Have you got somewhere to go?” “Yes, we’ve got relatives in Sandown and Brading and that.” So, they disappeared and that’s the last we actually saw of them.
But the amount of damage there was, yeah, their roofs were off … I’m not at all surprised that that’s what they wanted to do. They just wanted to get out of their houses because it was so dangerous to stay in them and they’d actually stayed several hours, sort of crouched under the gorse bushes up on the Downs.
Anyway, from then on, we made sure everybody was OK and returned to the Station and – to see the rest of our colleagues who’d been called out, who were on duty waiting there.
The flagpole that we saw wavering about had broken apparently about five minutes after we’d left the Station, because when the other people came down, the other Coastguards, the flagpole was broken so we just missed that little incident by several minutes. I think we finally got off duty about ten or eleven o’clock on that morning when a lot of the things had quietened down. So, that’s the night of the 15th/16th October 1987 in my memory anyway.
