The historian Thomas Pakenham began talking to his trees in the late 1980s to wish them luck in facing the wrath of the wind. I thought of Pakenham this week as I encountered some lingering debris from Storm Éowyn. During the storm, the live capturing of uprooted trees made for frightening drama, while the current dead trunks make for sad viewing.
Pakenham, founder of the Irish Tree Society in 1990, witnessed a violent storm in January 1991 that felled 12 beech trees that were almost 200 years old at his ancestral estate in Tullynally, Co Westmeath, which he moved to in 1961. He learned much there over time about both the vulnerability and resilience of different types of trees, his passion for them elaborated on in his 1996 book Meetings With Remarkable Trees and other subsequent volumes.
These books are partly about the battle for preservation. Single storms underline the sheer difficulty of that task; after Storm Éowyn, the British National Trust observed how it had “wreaked havoc” on its estates and gardens in Northern Ireland estimating, for example, that 10,000 trees in Mount Stewart in Co Down had been flattened by the wind. Northern Ireland is one of the least wooded parts of Europe and, given the role of trees in planet healing and biodiversity, it is particularly alarming to lose their imposing majesty and multi-purposefulness.
The depth of the history the trees carry is profound. Pakenham wrote, for example, of the surviving fragments of the great oak woods that had blanketed parts of Wicklow, “the Irish equivalent of Sherwood”. Forests once covered 80 per cent of this island’s land surface, reduced to 11.6 per cent by 2022.
Underground cabling could answer challenge of keeping lights on after storms
Mulcahy’s push for alternative to Fianna Fáil in 1948 government talks ‘enhanced democracy’, UCD event told
Biden’s legacy will be tarnished by his vanity and stubbornness
Forget pandering to Independent TDs, these are the issues the new government needs to deal with
For more recent history, we look up to our electricity poles, documented and celebrated as symbols of a new era as rural Ireland was electrified from 1946. The momentum behind this was impressive; The Irish Times reported in 1950 that in the previous four years 5,300 miles of wiring for 105,000 poles had been used in the rural electrification scheme.
The novelist Niall Williams has written powerfully of their presence in his books centred on the fictional western Irish rural town of Faha and its soggy hinterland, most recently in last year’s Time of the Child. On the day of the big electricity switch on “there was to be a class of ribbon-cutting ceremony on a stage erected outside the church gates. All who could would be there for the moment of history without bloodshed when Faha would become current. Flags and banners were already hanging across Church Street, tin whistlers in last rehearsal.”
The projected intensity of future tempests means the poles that once signalled our new modernity are becoming vulnerable beacons of outdatedness. ESB figures for its networks today list 2.1 million wooden poles, 150,000km of overhead line and just 22,000km of underground cable
From the start, the poles were compromised by the torment of wind on roads, as Williams puts it, “that were mostly bends and without mark of change but for the electricity poles that to western gales had surrendered the perpendicular, some tilting to 10 o’clock, one in the swamp of Skellys near enough nine, so they had an air of the temporary and were the first cause of the blackouts that in Faha were now the custom of winter”.
Climate change demands research, and that means looking back and forward. Historical data, such as that which records that Ireland in 2020 was at least 0.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the period 1961-1990, and that the decade 2006-2015 was the wettest Irish 10-year period in more than 300 years, is essential, but so too is planning. The projected intensity of future tempests means the poles that once signalled our new modernity are becoming vulnerable beacons of outdatedness. ESB figures for its networks today list 2.1 million wooden poles, 150,000km of overhead line and just 22,000km of underground cable.
In the 1950s, the ESB imported some poles from Finland, a country that responded to the threat of storms with an updated electricity market Act in 2013 stipulating that energy networks be designed and maintained to prevent storms causing blackouts lasting more than six hours in urban areas or more than 36 hours in other areas. Part of that is about increasing underground cabling.
Such ambition can still be shaken by new extremes. Finland experienced the exceptional violence of storm Jari in November that resulted in 70,000 Finnish households losing power overnight, but experts there have suggested it could have been worse. More advanced fault location and isolation and service restoration systems made a difference, with rapid identification of problem areas and effective communication between field crews and control centres. Long-term investments in underground cabling also mitigated the damage.
The technical challenges and economic costs of extensive underground cabling would be enormous in Ireland, especially given the dispersal of the population. But the ESB, which has always trumpeted its modernising mission since its foundation in 1927, still needs to produce a plan commensurate with the climate challenge; one that is beyond replaced poles, which are standing targets.
