Dreich and drookit in the Scottish rain

In the driving rain and rising winds outside Cumbernauld, one of many teams of Scottish Power engineers works away to reconnect customers.

It’ll take time. First off the trees which downed the powerlines have to be chainsawed clear.

Poles then have to be resited into the sodden earth. Only then can engineering shimmy up and get at untangling the mass of smashed wood, metal, cabling, insulators and steel.

One pole.

And there are hundreds across Scotland – by no means all close to road access either.

The rain from the Atlantic is unrelenting. Further gales are forecast.

Overnight around 37,000 homes were without power – though that’s a remarkable improvement given almost 100,000 had no electricity at the height of yesterday’s storm.

“The forecast is no that great,” Guy Jefferson of Scottish Power told Channel 4 News, “clearly our engineers cannot access poles or work at heights safely in galeforce conditions. We thank customers for their patience.”

Currently Britain’s in something of a respite, a brief window of relative calm before winds pick up again. Many areas of Wales and Scotland can expect gusts in excess of 75 mph. Though it is not expected that windspeeds will be quite so strong across most of Scotland.

Meanhile teams of engineers plough on in the cold, wet, mud and wind of the Scottish winter.

“Dreich” the Scottish onomatopoeia that conveys the wet, grey and generally miserable – doesn’t begin to convey the rain here today.

Likewise “drookit” the effect upon human clothes, body and soul of prolonged exposure to the dreich.

Suffering both, I thus apologise for the quality of photos embedded here. Like these engineers I did my best. Unlike them, my best probably falls short of what’s required – but our TV camera suffered too!

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