STORM DORIS HAS passed over Ireland and work is underway to repair the damage inflicted by winds that touched 140 km/h.
The storm reached its greatest intensity over Ireland towards the latter part of early this morning and at one point 56,000 people were without electricity.
ESB says that power has been restored to about 20,000 of those people and that over 2,000 network technicians are working to repair the remaining faults.
Some people are, however, are likely to spend this evening without power as the technicians struggle to with the wide geographical spread of the damage.
There are over 900 individual faults causing problems in areas reaching from the northwest to the eastern seaboard.
At least 12 flights were cancelled out of Dublin Airport this morning and delays will remain throughout the day as airlines deal with the backlog.
Handling agents had experienced difficulties disembarking from aircraft and unloading bags due to severe strong winds.
Flights in and out of the UK will continue to be affected throughout the day as the storm continues in northern parts of England and in Scotland.
Travellers are being urged to check on the status of their flights with individual airlines.
AA Roadwatch is reporting that fallen trees are continuing to cause problems on some routes but that the many of the blockages from earlier this morning have been cleared.
Met Éireann’s weather warnings have been lifted and winds will continue to ease into this evening.
Speaking on RTÉ’s News at One, Gerald Fleming said the storm has lifted.
“It’s doing its worst across northern England and Scotland too where it is pulling down cold air and leading to snow in places. We thankfully have seen the back of Doris,” Fleming said.
The veteran meteorologist added that such a storm is not unusual at this time of year, in fact was it was perhaps due given that the winter has been so mild:
It’s not untypical, we’ve had an extremely benign winter it’s fair to say. And going by our naming scheme this is only a ‘D’ and so the fourth storm to affect Britain or Ireland and two of those Angus and Conor didn’t affect us at all. Barbara affected us a couple of days before Christmas. So it’s been a very quiet winter.
Fleming added that we should expect some more very changeable weather over the next couple of weeks that may even turn into another storm
“This is not unusual but we’re entering a period of very unsettled and broken weather for the next five, six, seven days. And while we don’t see any similar storm immediately, there’s certainly the set-up that we could get something like this over the next week or two.”
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say