February 18th - Storm Eunice: What Can We Learn?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2022
⏱️ 5 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From commutes to holidays, Storm Eunice has caused devastation to millions of people's travel plans. Is severe weather becoming more of a frequent occurrence, and if so, how can we be better prepared next time? I explore the ways this can be achieved, from giving customers more notice about train cancellations and grounded planes, to being more efficient in organising compensation arrangements.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest |
| 0:06.6 | news on travelling, and I'm afraid on a day like today, Friday the 18th of February, there is only one |
| 0:13.4 | possible story, and that is Storm Eunice, and the devastation that it has caused to millions of |
| 0:20.5 | people's travel plans, whether that was |
| 0:23.2 | simply a trip into town that you couldn't take or a holiday of a lifetime that has been wrecked. |
| 0:29.9 | It's been a miserable day. And at the end of it, I really just want to draw out what I think |
| 0:36.6 | are some lessons that we could |
| 0:38.0 | use particularly if it is the case that severe weather is becoming a more frequent occurrence. |
| 0:46.1 | About this time yesterday, Transport for Wales said, right, we are closing all our railways |
| 0:52.9 | on Friday. We're not going to have any of them. We know that |
| 0:57.1 | there are going to be extremely strong winds. We know there will be debris put on to rail tracks. |
| 1:03.5 | And therefore, we simply aren't even going to start. It would be a reckless thing to do because |
| 1:10.7 | we know that people would have disturbed journeys. |
| 1:14.2 | Other companies said, basically, we really advise you not to go, but we do understand that some |
| 1:21.9 | people absolutely have to make journeys and therefore we want to do our best to get you there. Remember that the |
| 1:29.4 | railways are run by many thousands of fantastic men and women and they absolutely have the |
| 1:36.3 | travelling public's best interests at heart. So there are two opposing ways of looking at this. |
| 1:43.2 | One is, okay, we're going to give you certainty, |
| 1:46.5 | but on the other hand, we're going to take away any hope that you might have of making a journey |
| 1:50.5 | by rail, which of course is the safest form of transport. And on the other hand, well, we're |
| 1:56.9 | going to try and get you there, but frankly, who knows what's going to happen? Well, by now, |
| 2:02.1 | we do know what is going to happen, and that is effectively a kind of cascade of train operators |
... |
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