Kirsty Scott
21-01-05

Scotland's coastal communities have long had their own language of understatement for the weather, so familiar are they with the worst that winter can throw at them.
But the devastating storms of the last week and a warning from scientists that they may just be a taste of what is to come have shaken many of the country's most exposed centres of population, and raised serious concerns about how to protect them from possibly huge disruption and damage.
"It was just hellish," said Hugh Dan MacLennan, spokesman for the ferry operator Caledonian MacBrayne, of the hurricane-force winds that battered the north-west. "The skippers have never seen anything like it. The biggest ship in the world could not have gone out in it. I don't think anyone is under any illusion now after last week."
It was the first time in living memory that all of Calmac's services had been suspended because of bad weather.
From his tracking station at Thurso's Environmental Research Institute, John Coll and his colleagues from the Southampton Oceanography Centre have been watching wave and weather patterns in the north Atlantic and have noticed an increasingly clear pattern in recent decades of more frequent and more intense Atlantic cyclones, and a growth in wave heights of some 10% to 15% in the last 40 years.
The seas are getting stormier, they say, with the inevitable result of more frequent disruption to communities and transport networks.
"In the past decade there have been more intensive storms coming in," said Mr Coll. "We have to be careful and not be alarmist. [Last week] was a severe storm, but it doesn't have to be that severe in the context of ferries to start disrupting services.
"Lifeline services to the Western Isles are already heavily subsidised to maintain and link communities. If the intensity of this recent storm is repeated with greater frequency, the level of subsidy may have to rise to provide bigger boats to protect timetables and maintain communities."
Calmac, and the Scottish executive, say it's not that simple.
"There may be changes coming and it's helpful that people can understand the science, because it's not us using the weather as an excuse," said Mr MacLennan. "Bigger is not necessarily best. You can't build a boat as big as you want. If someone says you have to replace your fleet, we're talking silly money."
Communities along the north-west coast are also taking stock of what the storms and the researchers' predictions might mean. Yesterday more than 1,000 people attended the funeral of a family of five who were washed from a road on South Uist by huge waves as they tried to flee rising waters in the storms.
Some on South Uist say they had repeatedly raised concerns about the exposed coastal road near the village of Eochar where Archie MacPherson, his wife, Murdina, their two children, Andrew, seven, and Hannah, five, and Mrs MacPherson's father, Calum Campbell, are thought to have been overcome by the waves. The Western Isles council says it is waiting for the police report to establish exactly where the family were when they were swept away.Officials say coastal protection is a complex issue. To build coastal defences on such vulnerable roadways could cost as much as £1m a mile.
"For an island area, coastal erosion is a major problem," said a council spokesman, Nigel Scott. "Obviously the council is limited in what it can do in terms of coastal protection, because frankly we could spend our entire budget on coastal protection.
"But having said that, it doesn't mean that we won't look at specific problems. You can't protect the entire coastline, so we have to prioritise."
The Scottish executive, which sent a minister to the Hebrides after the first storm, has been making sympathetic noises about funding and support, but the money it has offered would not stretch far along the western coastline.
On Monday, the deputy minister for environment and rural development, Lewis Macdonald, said the executive was committed to helping local authorities protect communities from flooding. He said it had made £89m available over the next three years for flood defences and coastal protection.
Any request from the Western Isles council for funding for new coastal protection would be given the closest attention.
The council has set up a taskforce to look at the damage caused by the storms and what might be done if they recur. "I have been here 10 years and I have never seen weather like it," said Mr Scott. "It was just incredible. Someone said it was the worst weather for 20 years; I think it was more than that."

for further information:
John.Coll@thurso.uhi.ac.uk