The greatest storm surge on record for the North Sea occurred
on 31 January and 1 February 1953. The surge height reached 2.74
m at Southend in Essex, 2.97 m at King's Lynn in Norfolk and 3.36
m in the Netherlands.
Across south-east England
- 300 drowned
- 24,000 houses damaged
- 180,000 acres flooded
Netherlands
- 1835 drowned
- 46,000 houses damaged
- 322,500 acres flooded
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The storm that caused the disastrous surge at the end of
January 1953 was among the worst to visit the UK in the
20th century. Hurricane-force winds had blown down more
trees in Scotland than were normally felled in a year. A
car ferry, the Princess Victoria, on passage from Stranraer
in Scotland to Larne in Northern Ireland, sank with the
loss of 133 lives - only 41 of the passengers and crew survived.
From Yorkshire to the Thames Estuary, coastal defences had
been pounded by the sea and given way under the onslaught.
During the afternoon of the 31st, the shingle spit of Spurn
Head in Yorkshire was breached. Soon after darkness fell,
Lincolnshire bore the brunt of the storm. Sand was scoured
from beaches and sand hills, timber-piled dunes were breached,
the landward slopes of embankments were eroded, concrete
sea walls crumbled, the promenades of Mablethorpe and Sutton-on-Sea
were wrecked, and seawater broke through to flood agricultural
land.
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Because many telephone lines in Lincolnshire and Norfolk had
been brought down by the wind, virtually no warnings of the storm's
severity were passed to counties farther south until it was too
late.
Later that evening, embankments around The Wash were overtopped
and people were drowned in northern Norfolk. Fifteen died in King's
Lynn and another 65 between there and Hunstanton. At Wells-next-the-Sea,
a 160-ton vessel was left high and dry on the quay.
By midnight, Felixstowe, Harwich and Maldon had been flooded,
with much loss of life. Soon after midnight, the sea walls on
Canvey Island collapsed and 58 people died. At Jaywick in Clacton,
the sea rose a metre in 15 minutes and 35 people drowned.
The surge travelled on. From Tilbury to London's docklands, oil
refineries, factories, cement works, gasworks and electricity
generating stations were flooded and brought to a standstill.
In London's East End, 100 metres of sea wall collapsed, causing
more than 1,000 houses to be inundated and 640,000 cubic metres
of Thames water to flow into the streets of West Ham. The BP oil
refinery on the Isle of Grain was flooded, and so too was the
Naval Dockyard at Sheerness.
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Almost 100,000 hectares of eastern England were flooded
and 307 people died. In The Netherlands, 50 dykes burst
and 1,800 people drowned. The flood covered nine per cent
of all Dutch agricultural land and three per cent of the
dairy country. The sea reclaimed over 200,000 hectares of
polder country.
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Flooding
in Whitstable |
Could it happen again?
Although storm-force winds occurring with high tides are a dangerous
but rare combination, there is no reason to suppose that the meteorological
situation of 1953 could not recur one day. In fact, with the south-east
region of the UK actually sinking at the rate of about 1 cm each
year, the risk of storm surge damage could increase.
Following on from the events of 1953, the Met Office developed
its storm tide warning service to forecast surges. Recently the
weather data available at the time of the 1953 event were re-analysed
by the Met Office's numerical prediction models, and the results
showed accurate predictions of the movement and intensity of the
storm surge.
So, the bad news is that a severe surge could happen again -
but the good news is that the Met Office will be able to warn
of its approach.
What is a surge?
Surges are caused mainly by the action of wind on the surface
of the sea, with barometric pressure a secondary factor. When
pressure decreases by one millibar, sea level rises by one centimetre.
Thus, a deep depression with a central pressure of about 960 mb
causes sea level to rise half a metre above the level it would
have been had pressure been about average (1013 mb). When air
pressure is high, sea level falls correspondingly.
Around the UK, the effect of a strong wind coupled with very
low pressure can be to raise sea level in eastern England more
than two metres. Fortunately, though, large positive surges tend
to favour mid-tide. They rarely coincide with high water.
More from
Education about the east coast floods of 1953
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