Storm Babet renews focus on climate resilience and warning systems

UK climate resilience has been tested by the impact of Storm Babet on the eastern Scottish mainland, which has caused multiple deaths and significant property damage. IEMA's Digital Journalist Tom Pashby reports.

Storms are named in the UK, in partnership with Met Office sister agencies in Ireland and the Netherlands, when they are deemed to have the potential to cause medium or high impacts. Babet is the second of the 2023/2024 storm season, with Agnes already having passed.

The Met Office took the rare step of issuing a red weather warning. A red level warning indicates that a storm is likely to cause ‘a risk to life, as well as substantial disruption to travel and infrastructure’.

The UK Government’s recently launched Emergency Alerts, a system which is designed to warn every person within a defined geographic area of ‘danger to life nearby’ was trailed as being a key tool when responding to extreme weather events.

Around 10 percent of the households in the town of Brechin in Angus, Scotland, were told to evacuate because of the risk of life-threatening flooding in the area.

Jacqui Semple, senior manager – risk, resilience and safety at Angus Council, said: “If we felt that it was necessary to be able to put [an Emergency Alert] out, then we would do. It's not something that we considered as part of [the response to Storm Babet], simply because of the alerts that were coming out from both SEPA and the Met Office and from our partners and from council areas.”

SEPA, which stands for Scottish Environment Protection Agency, is Scotland’s principle environmental regulator, responsible for protecting and improving the environment. Its equivalent in England is the Environment Agency.

Jacqui also said “A lot of people who live in a flood warning area are signed up to Floodline” and that Angus Council is “aware of the criteria that needs to be met for Emergency Alerts” to be issued.

She said a decision to issue an Emergency Alert would “go through our resilience partnership” as well as the Scottish and UK governments.

Emergency Alerts are delivered to smartphones via mobile network masts within defined areas, a significant proportion of which are owned by BT. Mobile network infrastructure is vulnerable to both loss of power and damaging wind during extreme weather events.

A BT Group spokesperson said: “BT Group has well-established contingency plans for a variety of power-loss scenarios to ensure we can keep our networks connected during severe storms. From a mobile perspective, this includes back-up generators and battery back-up at a number of mobile mast sites, as well as overlapping coverage in many locations where back-up power isn’t available.”

At the time of writing, no Emergency Alerts have been issued, aside from tests.