This is damn interesting.

Headphones recommend it.

Surface Tension

By Matt Castle

Low pressure weather systems are a familiar feature of the winter climate in the Northern Atlantic.

While they often drive wind and other unpleasantness against Europe's rocky western margin,

this is typically on a mostly harmless basis.

Early in the evening of the 31st of January, 1953, the weather in Northern Europe was damp, chilly,

and blustery.

These unremarkable seasonal conditions disguised the fact that a storm of extreme severity

was massing nearby, and that an ill-fated assortment of meteorological, geophysical,

and human factors would soon coalesce into an almost unprecedented watery catastrophe.

The storm scutted past the northern tip of Scotland and took an unusual southerly

detour, shifting towards a low-lying, soft European overbelly of prime agricultural, industrial and residential

land.

The various people, communities and countries in its path differed in their readiness and

their responses to the looming crisis, yet the next 24 hours were about to teach them

all some enduring lessons.

In a world that remains awash with extreme weather events and with increasing numbers

of people living in vulnerable coastal areas, the story of this particular storm system's

collision with humanity remains much studied by emergency planners and much remembered in the

three countries it so fatally struck.

...