Kinghorn gets a battering

We’ve had the worst stormy weather in years this week and Kinghorn got totally battered by rain, wind and sea. The bad weather started last weekend and it just would not stop raining. The winds then picked up and by Monday night the rain was falling horizontally. Taking the dog out for a walk was just awful – but had to be done -pushing ourselves against the wind along the street was quite comical.

I meant to post this last week, but I’ve had a problem with my flickr photo album plugin since I upgraded my flickr account to a pro account – for some reason the plugin just refused to insert images into my posts. I’ve spent all morning uninstalling and reinstalling, deleting my cache and adjusting settings etc and I’ve finally got it to work but not with the original settings. If I include this line of code:

define(‘TANTAN_DISPLAY_POPUP_SIZE’, ‘Large’);

in my config file the plugin stops working, but if I change the word Large to Original, it works just fine. It’s a good job I re-size most of my images to be 600px high before uploading to flickr, so using the Original setting should be fine. The support for this plugin isn’t great, so I’ve got no way to find out why this problem has occurred.

Anyway I digress – By Tuesday night the heavy snow started and when Colin came back from walking the dog that evening he was soaked despite the fact he had his waterproof gear on. He was covered in snow and debris and the dog gave up half way through the walk and ran all the way home and was whimpering outside the front door – not like her at all, so it must’ve been so severe she couldn’t cope.

Here are some images I took on Tuesday afternoon:

Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering Kinghorn Gets A Battering

It was a combination of strong easterly winds and a very high tide on Tuesday night that ended up causing landslides and erosion. Waves battered the sea walls around the Caravan Park and late in the night two caravans got washed out to sea. Tom Wallace owns Kinghorn Harbour and Pettycur Bay caravan parks and I found this snippet of him describing what happened:

“We lost two caravans to the sea. One fell into the sea roundabout 3.30pm at high tide and another one went through the night. It was there when I went down at 3am and when I went down at 4am it was away. Caravans can be replaced, walls can be replaced, but as long as no one has been hurt, that’s the main thing. The waves, I would have to say, were at least 35 to 40 feet high and were landing 50 feet back from the wall. The seawater was landing on caravans at the back. ”

Boats in the harbour pictured above were damaged and as the waters rose, waves crashed against the houses on the shore front and debris, including a three-piece suite from one of the ill-fated caravans, were tossed about in the surf. I found it quite frightening just standing there at a safe distance taking the photographs. At times like this you realise the power of nature and what devastating effects it can have in extreme conditions. These images show the start of the storm – it got worse later on in the evening and the storm reached it’s peak in the middle of the night. We felt quite safe up on our cliff, but I did worry about it breaking apart and our house tumbling into the sea from it’s great height – I didn’t sleep very well that night!

I found out the next morning as I was walking the dog that the Kinghorn Lifeboat Station was also damaged – the force of the water smashed in the station’s door, but thankfully the lifeboat itself was unharmed. There was a massive clear up on Wednesday morning with diggers and lorries taking away all the debris that had been washed up. At some points it was impossible to get onto the beach without climbing over it all.

I didn’t go down to Pettycur Bay, but I heard that day that one of the fishing huts was washed away and the others were badly damaged. I presume the boats in the harbour there were probably damaged as well.

It’s all very calm now and we had a really sunny, pleasant Easter Weekend – a definite calm after the storm!