Winter in control
♦armed Forces ferry NHS staff to work ♦freeze raises fears of gas shortage ♦coldest spring day on record
THE Army was forced to step in last night as police and hospitals struggled to cope with the freezing weather.
Nearly every part of the country was hit by snowfall and gales as the Met Office said yesterday was the coldest spring day on record. Gas supplies ran so low factories were paid to shut down.
Forecasters warned of life-threatening conditions and said winter was “still in control” as Storm Emma followed in the wake of the Siberian weather front nicknamed the Beast from the East.
The death toll from the storms rose to 10 after a seven-year-old girl was killed in Cornwall as she played in the snow when a car hit a house and knocked down a wall.
More than 1,000 schools were closed during disruption described as the worst “in a generation”, and hospitals cancelled non-urgent operations and appointments.
Motorists in Hampshire faced spending the night in their cars after police declared a “major incident” on the A31 where drivers had been stranded for several hours. The military was also called in to assist.
Panic-buying and snowbound lorries left supermarket shelves empty of food in parts of the country, while England’s first red alert for snow was issued since the Met Office introduced its traffic light warning system in 2011.
Theresa May had to move her longawaited Brexit speech from Newcastle-upon-tyne to London, while households were be urged to “carry on cooking” by Claire Perry, the energy minister, after National Grid issued a “gas deficit warning”, prompting fears of a shortage.
The Environment Agency put out five coastal flood warnings urging the public to take “immediate action”, with two in Cornwall, one at Swanage in Dorset, and others for the Tyne estuary and at Whitley Bay, Tyne & Wear.
Sixteen further flood alerts have been issued telling people to “be prepared” in the South West and North East as strong winds and high tides combine. Road conditions remained dangerous with motorists across much of the country warned against driving unless absolutely essential. The AA said damage costing £10 million had been done to cars in just three days with an estimated 8,000 collisions, two thirds of them due to snow and ice. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, the First Minister, criticised transport company bosses who had continued to send drivers out on to the roads despite official warnings to avoid non-essential journeys.
Army and Royal Air Force personnel were called in to ferry health workers through blocked roads.
In Lincolnshire, 10 RAF 4x4 vehicles crewed by 20 airmen carried health staff from dawn after an urgent request from local police. Soldiers from 3rd Bn The Rifles and 2nd Bn The Royal Regiment of Scotland transported staff from Edinburgh Royal Infirmary and the Western General. Gavin Williamson, the Defence Secretary, said: “Our service personnel are showing great dedication and a spirited sense of duty as they support local authorities and keep the British people safe.”
A red weather warning, the second in 24 hours and just the third issued in seven years, was given for south-west England and south Wales as Storm Emma moved in with strong winds, blizzard conditions and severe drifting. Some parts of the South West faced up to 1ft 8in (50cm) of snow.
Sophie Yeomans, a Met Office forecaster, said: “Things could yet get worse; there is more snow on its way. The problem will be when the snow gets compacted and turns to ice. Meteorologically, it’s the first day of spring but winter is clinging on and giving us a right old kicking. It’s still in control.”
Nearly all train operators warned of cancellations and disruption and all cross-border trains between England and Scotland were suspended. Virgin Trains East Coast asked passengers not to travel yesterday or today on the East Coast Main Line. Paddington station was closed for several hours. Hundreds of flights were also cancelled.
Yesterday set a record for the UK’S coldest spring day. In Tredegar in South Wales temperatures never got above 22.6F (-5.2C), beating 23.7F (-4.6C) at Cassley in Sutherland, Scotland, on March 2 2001.
BRITAIN is on the brink of running out of gas in its first winter since the Government allowed the storage facility it relied on for decades to close.
The Siberian storm this week pushed demand for gas heating to its highest level in a decade, causing market prices to increase fourfold to 12-year highs and raising fears that energy suppliers may bump up household bills.
Britain once relied solely on its own North Sea supplies to meet demand, but a string of supply outages this week has laid bare the growing reliance on global imports as domestic gas reserves dwindle and the country’s ageing storage capacity shuts down.
To conserve its remaining gas, National Grid is running the country’s last remaining coal plants at their maximum capacity to avoid using gas for power generation. Wind turbines defied expectations by emerging as the biggest power source yesterday.
However, National Grid last night admitted that, for the first time in almost a decade, gas supplies would still not be enough to meet demand unless energy-intensive industries agreed to use less.
The operator said gas supplies would fall short by around 14 per cent, or 54 million cubic meters, unless demand was lower. The supply gap is far larger than during National Grid’s last supply warning, in January 2010, when it was only 39million cubic metres.
National Grid and the Government have both insisted that “domestic gas will not be affected”.
“This is a situation that we are always prepared for and a deficit warning is part of our normal toolkit in extreme weather to make sure we can balance gas supply and demand,” the grid operator said.
Claire Perry, the energy minister, said the Government was in “constant contact” with National Grid to monitor the market during the extreme weather. “So do carrying on using your gas heating and cooking meals as nor- mal,” she said. National Grid’s supply warning emerged just hours after the Government insisted that there were no supply concerns.
Britain’s gas supplies have been pushed to the brink by an unexpected outage at a key import terminal for liquefied natural gas tankers.
The South Hook LNG outage follows a string of similar mishaps at key pipelines bringing in gas from Norway and the Netherlands, as well as technical trouble at a processing plant in the Norwegian North Sea.
National Grid hopes that by paying factories to cut their gas consumption, homes will not be hit by the “perfect storm”. But industry says its calls for the Government to help prevent a gas crisis were ignored in the wake of the Rough gas storage shutdown last year.
Simon Wood, from S&P Global Platts, the data company, said: “It is highly likely that National Grid will have to interrupt supply to industrial
‘This is a situation that we are always prepared for… so do carry on using your heating and cooking meals’
consumers as it struggles to balance the system as UK flexibility remains limited and the continental temperatures are set to remain well below normal into the weekend.”
An industry alliance is preparing to confront the Government later this month about the country’s lack of storage capacity, which could cause factories to move to the Continent, in a major blow to UK industry and jobs.
The closure of the Rough sub-sea storage cavern cut the UK’S already meagre storage capacity by 70pc. Before the shutdown, the UK was able to store enough gas to last for 16 days, based on average demand. Germany has stores to last for 73 days.
Algy Cluff, a veteran North Sea pioneer, said: “After five decades in the UK energy industry, it astonishes me that three days of cold weather has led to us being quite so exposed.
“There is an urgent need to develop a sustained domestic gas industry such that we do not get these shortages and that we can never be held to ransom by foreign gas exporting nations.”