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"Well
it was obviously one of the greatest storms we’ve ever experienced
in this part of the country and it started way out over the Atlantic
with an area of low pressure moving towards Britain, which ordinarily
wouldn’t necessarily have been a big problem.
"What it was doing was deepening and heading towards the north
of Scotland, between Scotland and Iceland towards the Faroe Islands
in fact and that was taking place on the Friday 30th January 1953.
"Starting to deepen, like a traditional Atlantic low does,
and the big problem was that it had pushed a lot of water ahead
of it on strong southwesterly winds around this deepening low. To
the south of it, in fact, there were very strong southwesterly gales
and those had pushed quite a bit of water across the Atlantic towards
the north of Scotland and around the top of Scotland.
"Now had it been left at that, that could have been a manageable
situation. But what happened subsequently was that on Saturday 31st
January 1953 the low started to turn. Instead of heading north eastwards
it started to turn east and then south eastwards towards Denmark.
"During the course of Saturday 31st it moved fairly smartly
towards Denmark, still deepening to a low pressure of about 968
millibars, which in itself is not desperately low, it’s typical
for a deep depression in Britain during the winter months. But what
it also did, as the low got just that little further to the east,
it allowed very strong northerly gales to develop over Britain and
down the north sea and that’s the crucial feature.
"These strong northerly gales, severe gales, even storm force
winds helped to bring the water, remember the day before which had
been pushed past the north of Scotland just towards the Norwegian
coast, and these northerly gales started to bring the water south
into the North Sea.
"Now during Saturday 31st January it was a day of spring tide
later in the day, in the evening, and the maximum strength of the
winds of this particular storm was within an hour or two of the
high tide. So it added to this extremely high tide and the surge
of water produced by the action of the weather, rather than the
normal tidal activity, was enough to overwhelm vast areas of land
and it caused great loss of life down the eastern coast of England
particularly."
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