With over 80 flood warnings issued by the Meteorological Office, Britain faces a week of chaos ahead from a "weatherbomb" which came in off the Atlantic during the weekend. Further severe weather conditions are threatened for the coming week.
"The weather over the last few days has been extremely violent", Doug Kempster of the Government Environment Agency told BBC. "It's not typical weather. We have seen container vessels that cannot leave ports, ferries that ran aground, lorries being blown over, trees being ripped up."
Wales has been hardest hit, with Monmouth endangered by flooding of the the River Wye. The Welsh border country around Hereford and Ludlow are also under severe flood warning with the Wye and Teme rivers bursting their banks from torrential rain pouring off the Welsh mountains.
Large areas of the Midlands, North East England, Scotland and Northern Ireland are also affected, with further heavy downpours, accompanied by gale force winds, making road travel hazardous from falling trees, flooded rivers and landslides.
Rough seas have caused cancellation of many Channel and Irish Sea ferry crossings. Passengers on the Brittany Ferries St.Malo - Plymouth run suffered a daunting 27 hours stranded aboard the boat which was prevented from docking at Plymouth by the high seas and gale winds.
Wet and Windy Start to Rugby Union Six Nations Tournament
The famous annual rugby-union tournament began at the weekend, (players of rugby have little respect for weather conditions), with Scotland being trounced at home in Edinburgh by a superior English side and the Welsh being given a hiding in Dublin by the Ireland home team. The luckless visitors were without many of the supporters who had a hard time struggling to get to Dublin thanks to Irish Sea Ferry cancellations.
The tournament is the highlight of the rugby-union year with England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France and Italy competing for the honours on grounds in London, (Twickenham), Edinburgh, Cardiff, Dublin, Paris and Rome every other Saturday from now through March into early April. Home games at Murrayfield, Edinburgh usually attract The Princess Royal who is Patron of Scottish Rugby-Union.
The Tournament was actually the Five Nations for 90 years until 2000 when Italy joined in. Il Duce Mussolini introduced this celtic game to Italy in the 1930s and it took off in earnest in the 1960s with the help of Oxford University which commenced sending sent a side over to play Italian universities.
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