Awaiting Christine...

Lahinch Prom: January, 3, 2014.

The storms that slammed into the North Clare Village of Lahinch on Friday the third of January caused the worse damage in forty years, according to residents who remembered the 1974 wreckage. The road from Lahinch to the neighbouring fishing village of Liscannor was impassable for a time. On reopening the landscape around it was almost unrecognisable. The debris strewn fields brought to mind the catastrophic typhoon in the Philippines only months before. Preliminary clean-up operations have barely made a scratch in the damage but already another mighty storm is about to batter the punch drunk west coast.

This is ground zero; literally. The surreal +George Karbus photo captures the row of flats were we wait for the promised storm with stoic anticipation. 

The seasonal decorations are not even down as the aptly named Christine makes landfall. I sit in my friends flat in beautiful North Clare and dwell on what an appropriate place nature has chosen to make her power known.

Hurricane Christine threatens Ireland

The nearby Burren is a unique landscape. Here man has a direct connection to his primitive past. When the first Neolithic builder stacked one of the rocks left behind after the last Ice age, upon another one, the point where geography turned into history seemed to be marked. Now geography seems set on taking man’s creations back.

 For millennia man has spread out of his ancient ancestral African homeland and covered the globe. Forests, fossil fuels, precious minerals and animals have all been plundered in the quest for global dominance but now for the first time on humans are faced with retreat on a global scale.

There will be no retreat today. I love this town that for two years was my home. These are my friends and they are staying right here. Ollie Coughlan whose flat we are hunkered down in, is a true friend; the best. If ever there was a man I would want to share a foxhole with it would be this man. He is not leaving so neither am I. Not until the storm is over.

Die-Hard locals Evan Phillips and Ollie Coughlan

Two days ago I interviewed local evacuee Ollie Oeter for the local paper, he said:

  "we got up and tried to stop the leaks; thats when the front window exploded" 

"I could throw a stone through their second floor window from where I am sat, so close are the two apartments."

We are joking that nothing will happen, after all the hype it will all be a washout, pardon the pun. Tonight something is different though. On the forty five minute drive up from Shannon between 12.30 and 1.15 am I counted a dozen lightning flashes of lightening yet my windscreen wipers were not turned on once. I never remember that before, the anticipation in the air is electric, literally.

Six years after the collapse of Fanny Mae pushed the inconvenient truth to the inside of the newspapers nature has decided she deserves the headlines as the world’s true reality star.While we were complaining about sovereignty and negative equity the average sea levels rose by an inch. The rate of growth continues to accelerate. There are many unknowns’, variables that could increase this rate of acceleration massively. This includes the massive Thawites glacier in Antarctica breaking free from its berth, instantly adding three feet to sea levels (National Geographic Vol 224 issue 3 page 41). Whilst no one can truly predict the whats, whens and ifs of these variables, the one thing that is guaranteed is that the rate of increase will continue to accelerate. It is a very inconvenient fact that storms like this and damage like this will become more common and more destructive.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that by 2070 150 million people will be at risk from coastal flooding. The OECD admits this is a conservative estimate. Within the life times of most people reading this piece the global retreat will be underway.