Towyn’s Devastating Floods
By Paul Homewood
Just four weeks after the Burns Day storm, another massively powerful storm brought devastating floods to Towyn, in North Wales.
The video is well worth watching:
The combination of strong onshore winds, low pressure and spring tides caused severe flooding and damage.
North-westerly gales and a deep low pressure raised the sea level by 1.5m (4.9ft), creating a storm surge in the Irish Sea.
This surge, combined with a high tide and large waves, overwhelmed the sea defences.
The worst affected area was the coastal stretch from Pensarn to Kinmel Bay.
In Towyn, the sea breached a railway embankment and hundreds of tonnes of sea-water rushed through the streets flooding hundreds of homes and caravans.
About 5,000 people had to be evacuated in the 1990 floods
The flooding happened without warning and people stranded in their homes by the floods had to be rescued.
About 5,000 people had to be evacuated and most could not return home for months afterwards.
Others had to wait years to move back into their properties.
Experts believe that this was a one in a 500 to 1,000 year event and the town took a number of years to fully recover from the devastation.
Elsewhere, the severe gales caused structural damage, uprooted trees and claimed the lives of 14 people across the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-51630850
There’s another home made video below. It’s 15 minutes long, but worth watching the first couple of minutes, especially the scary sight of the sea crashing over the sea wall.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I was living close to the North Wales Coast at that time and spent a lot of that winter working in the coastal towns and also round into Merseyside. I still remember that winter because with almost every cycle of high tides it was a fear that waves would batter the coast and flood coastal roads or houses. There was a series of gales and storms one after another. That constant storm threat that winter was on a much, much bigger scale and frequency than we have had this year.
I wonder if all those eejits wishing to ‘get CO2 back to 1990 levels’ would want a return of the storms and flooding of that year too??? Obviously, early 1990 weather wasn’t caused by anthropogenic climate change, so what was it?🤬
Nearly every flooding event is a combination of a low pressure system and spring tides, the media never mention spring tides, which makes me doubt they aware of the phenomena. In the Conway valley flooding is regular, but with a spring tide there’s nowhere for the water to go except sideways. I await the day when the ‘science consensus’ blames spring tides on the activities of mankind.
It is notable that Towyn is only a few short miles south of the oft-discussed village of Fairbourne. So, same rugged, exposed Atlantic coastline and Fairbourne must have copped it from that storm surge too. Odd that Fairbourne wasn’t discussed in these reports. Perhaps the damage wasn’t quite as bad and/or, as Fairbourne inevitably gets flooded, it wasn’t regarded as newsworthy then.
Apologies to magesox for pointing this out, but for the sake of accuracy Towyn is nowhere near Fairbourne. Towyn is on the north coast of Wales between Rhyl and Abergele. Tywyn – different spelling – and Fairbourne are on the west coast between Barmouth and Aberystwyth.
See Towyn on Google Maps for a good look at the current state of the improved sea walls. As with so many areas of former marsh reclaimed from the sea they will remain vulnerable to storm surges. Nothing to do with CO2 but much to do with the loss (Dunwich and Bacton) and gain ( Rye and Winchelsea ) of sea margins.
I used Google Earth Pro and checked elevations. The many, apparently new, houses and all else seem to be protected by an ~6 m. high barrier.
I’d want to be at least 5 km from the water and 5X higher than those houses.
As a student in the 1950s I worked on a milk round in the summer vacs delivering lorry loads of crates to the holiday camps between Rhyl and Abergele and it was well known since the residential occupation of the area that Towyn and Pensarn were vulnerable to regular flooding. But they still kept on building.
Land liable to flooding ( + subsidence and other hazards) is where it is more expensive to insure all structures thought to be vulnerable. Anywhere requiring special measures to deal with groundwater are also affected. The land values are depressed as a consequence and in the short term -the term of interest to house builders- developer builders will make out that their output is good value , at least until the insurers take fright. Council planning depts. may grant consent subject to there being no habitable rooms on the ground floor although that may not be enough to mollify the insurers.
Also for those who think that tidal energy is fully predictable….