HAILSTONES the size of golf balls. A month’s rain in a day. Tropical nights for a week. These are some of the severe weather conditions affecting the UK.
Today, unseasonably high winds are forecast to batter Wales and the West Country as Boris Johnson’s Government announced that over the next year more than £860 million will be invested in flood prevention schemes across Britain.
Yet other countries have had it much worse, with many lives lost to flash flooding, landslides, wildfires and soaring temperatures.
It’s only July but 2021 has already seen a frightening array of extreme weather events from record snowfalls in Madrid -– yes, Madrid – which brought the Spanish capital to a standstill to heavy rainfall in western Germany which destroyed homes and bridges along the River Ahr, and the worst dust-storm in China which grounded flights and closed schools as the sky over Beijing turned orange with the dust mixing with pollution to create a hazardous cocktail. Meanwhile, there’s been a “heavier-than-normal” start to America’s wildfire season with Oregon suffering one of the largest blazes in its history, destroying more than 364,000 acres of land.