Monday, August 11, 2014
We didn't mean to be disaster tourists - we just drove to Ardmair to look at the waves pounding the beach in the aftermath of Hurricane Bertha. Greger suggested driving further, and in the end we turned east to have a look at the river at Oykel Bridge. The grassy ledge where he had stood a couple of days ago was now deep under a raging, leaping torrent.
We decided to make a round drive of it and come back over the Dirrie Mor. Somewhere near Dingwall, a large road sign warned that the A835 was closed west of the Braemore, but I misread the road number. This happens to be the only road into Ullapool from the south; and just outside Leckmelm, a couple of miles from Ullapool, we came to a standstill in a queue of traffic.
This lasted for two hours, and then they waved us through. It soon became clear that the problem was landslides.
A large digger parked by a house where a stream passes under the road marked the beginning of the storm-hit part of the A835. There wasn't much debris here, but both the house and a farm on the lower slope between the road and the loch suffered huge damage.
The next stretch looked worse (although fortunately no houses were involved) because the stuff had nowhere to go and had been pushed back by the diggers and piled at the sides of the road. A couple of streams flow down steep slopes which had been destabilised by forestry operations, with the overflowing streams washing down earth, rocks, and timber, blocking the culverts and flooding the road.
We then picked up a bit of speed - but it hadn't finished yet. Looking along the slowing file of cars ahead, I could see a caravan lurching up and down, and we soon realised why; there was a third landslide at the foot of the drive belonging to a B&B, and this pile of debris had not been completely cleared from the surface of the road. We edged slowly forward over some alarmingly large stones; this is when you could do with a 4x4.
When we reached Ullapool, we saw that they had placed a Road Closed sign just before the garage, so traffic heading south was building up in a queue there awaiting its turn to go through.
At home we had no TV for a while, and now we have no water. Greger discovered that the water people are working on getting pipes repaired. We go out looking at torrential rain and raging rivers - and because of the torrential rain and the raging rivers, we have no water. Oh, the irony.
// posted by Christine @ 2:34 PM 
