IF the wind on Tuesday had been just a little worse Storm Barra could have done much more damage, West Clare businessman Kevin Heapes feels.
He runs Pure Camping in Querrin and operates his own weather station on the site, which recorded a gust of 126.7km on Tuesday afternoon. “I publish it on the web, where anyone can look at it. It’s useful for campers coming down, they might be in an office in Dublin and wondering what it’s like in west Clare. At the same time I’d have interest in the weather and its’ great watching the gusts and seeing what’s happening, especially on a day like Tuesday.”
When that speed was reached Clare hadn’t even reached red alert status, but thankfully things didn’t deteriorate as the afternoon went on. “We got those gusts around 2pm and we didn’t go into red alert until 4pm, so I was thinking it’s either come early or it’s going to be very bad later on. I suppose 4pm might have been an average for county Clare, because it was slow moving. We’re down in south Clare so we might have seen it a bit earlier.”
With the county being in a red alert there were fears of very severe damage, and there was some relief that things weren’t as bad as they might have been, but Kevin says if the wind speed had been just a little higher it could have been a lot worse. “It was on the edge of damage if you know what I mean. Another ten kilometres and we’d have been in trouble. I have ten acres of woodland here and there’s a couple of trees down, but not an awful lot. The ground has been so soft that there’s not much traction forthe roots. if you know what I mean, there has been so much rain and that’s why the trees are coming down I’d say.
“It’s lucky enough that it’s late in the season, if you got it in September you’d be in trouble with the leaves on them. They don’t get blown over the same way in the winter.
It could have been so much worse, he feels. “Yesterday, we dodged a bullet,” he observed on Wednesday.
He says that with the storm having quite a long duration, if the wind speed had been just a little higher things might have been a lot worse. “It was a worry, if it was that couple of percent more intense and it went on so long it could have been bad. It didn’t get to the peaks that we were afraid of, but it was severe enough.”
Owen Ryan has been a journalist with the Clare Champion since 2007, having previously worked with a number of other publications in Limerick, Cork and Galway. His first book will be published in December 2024.