The ruins of an ice skating facility destroyed after strong winds parted, photographed in Blanchardstown, Ireland, Friday, January 24, 2025, as Storm Éowyn hit the island. Brian Lawless/AP Hidden Captions
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Brian Lawless/AP
LONDON – Emergency crews began cleaning up across the islands of Ireland and Scotland on Saturday after a storm that left at least one person dead, more than a million people out of power and blasted record winds. Ta.
Work is underway to remove hundreds of trees blocking road and rail lines in the wake of the system, which has been named Storm Ewin (pronounced Ay-oh-win) by weather officials.
In Ireland, winds rattled telephone poles, tore apart an ice rink in Dublin and toppled giant wind turbines. Wind gusts of 114 mph (183 kph) were recorded on the West Coast, a record set in 1945.
A man has died after a tree fell on his car in County Donegal in northwest Ireland, according to local police. They named the victim 20-year-old Kacper Dudek.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in the Republic of Ireland, neighboring Northern Ireland and Scotland remained without power on Saturday.
“The destruction caused by some of the strongest winds on record was unprecedented,” said Irish Prime Minister Michial Martin, adding that “every effort was made to get high voltage transmission lines up and running.” “We have reconnected our homes and secured water supply,” he added.
Schools were closed, trains, ferries and more than 1,100 flights were canceled in the Republic of Ireland on Friday, as UK city centers in Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow heeded government advice for people to stay at home. , it was eerily quiet.
Some of the storm’s energy came from a system that brought historic snowfall along the U.S. Gulf Coast, said Jason Nicholls, an international forecaster with the private weather company Accuweather.
Eowyn became a bomb cyclone. This happens when the storm’s pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours and intensifies rapidly. The storm was so powerful that meteorologists say a stabbing jet developed. In other words, Eowyn became a very strong wind in the atmosphere. A sting jet is a narrow region of wind traveling at 100 mph (161 kph) or faster that is drawn from the moderate troposphere to the Earth’s surface and lasts for several hours.
Scientists say it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact impact of climate change on storms, but all storms are unusually strong due to human-released pollutants such as carbon dioxide and methane. It’s happening in an atmosphere that’s getting warmer faster.
“As the climate warms, we can expect these storms to become even more damaging and stronger,” said Hayley Fowler, professor of climate change impacts at the University of Newcastle.
