On August 15th, 1986, a tropical storm began off the coast of South Carolina in the United States.
Two days later it morphed into a hurricane. But it was not an exceptional one. The east coast of the US gets annual hurricanes of varying strength.
Exceptional metrological circumstances saw it travel all the way up to Canada, bringing strong winds and heavy rain to Massachusetts, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.
It then crossed the Atlantic, picking up moisture as it travelled. Pressure dropped dramatically as it approached the west coast of Ireland, hitting the country with devastating results.
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Nines days after it first formed, Hurricane Charley made landfall, bringing with it unprecedented amounts of rainfall.
On the night of August 24th it started to rain off the south coast of Ireland and by midday on the 25th it was raining across the country. The rain compounded an already soggy summer, the second in a row. Land was already saturated and rivers were high when Hurricane Charley arrived.
A total of 12mm (or half an inch) of rain fell in Cork city between 9am and 10am on the 25th. In the next 24 hours a further 150mm of rain would fall in Cork and Kerry. Business premises in Skibbereen were flooded and Clonakilty businesses were also badly damaged.
The storm travelled up the south coast, hitting the Dublin area early on the 25th, and got worse as the day progressed.
Kippure in the Dublin Mountains experienced 280mm of rain in a day, a record that still stands. Flood defences, such as they were, were overwhelmed by the speed and scale of the deluge of rain that fell.
Five people were killed. A mother and daughter drowned at the North Quay in Dublin having been blown into the river Liffey. A man died of a heart attack after being rescued from his home near the river Dodder in Dublin. The Dodder claimed the life of another man who drowned when he fell into the raging waters.
A canoeist drowned in the river Nore in Co Kilkenny and a workman died in Newry, Co Down, when a trench caved in on him.
Worst affected were Bray in Co Wicklow and the Greater Dublin Area. About 500 households in Bray had to be evacuated when the river Dargle burst its banks. Some homes in the town were flooded to a depth of seven feet (213cm). Castle Street shopping centre was completely flooded and could only be accessed by boat.
The Bray flooding occurred on the 81st anniversary of a similar event which occurred in the town on August 25th, 1905. On that one day, the town recorded 113mm of rain, or the equivalent of two months’ worth.
It took until 2017 before the River Dargle Flood Defence Scheme was finally completed.
Retired journalist and Bray resident Noeleen McManus lived in Little Bray, which is on a flood plain. “We got a foot of water in our house in 1965 and 1986, but at the end of our terrace they got four foot of water,” she said. “There were boats coming up our road and disembarking our road to walk up to safety.”
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McManus was away at a friend’s house in Greystones when the floods struck. Her sister had agreed to give her respite as she had been looking after their mother, who was frail at the time.
“I woke the next morning at 9am to hear that Little Bray had been flooded and there were fish on the road in Castle Street,” she said.
“When I got home the house was destroyed downstairs, the dog had saved himself by getting to higher ground. Further down my road it was like a war zone, they got it much worse.”
In 2022 McManus and a few others published a book of reminiscences on the 1986 flood and another in 1965 entitled Never Again? Stories from the Floods of Little Bray.
The money used from the sale went to the SaveBray campaign, which is attempting to stop further development on the flood plain.
In 1986 the amount of rain that fell in the Dublin Mountains deluged the Dodder and Dargle rivers at their source.
Affluent parts of Dublin were also badly affected. The Dodder burst its banks, flooding the Merrion cricket ground and Anglesea Road.
In Sandymount Avenue, the Pembroke Hockey Club’s pitch turned into a lake just weeks after it was resurfaced, and Dart station car parks along the line were flooded.
Those living in single-storey cottages on Beatty’s Avenue and Ballsbridge Avenue were evacuated and returned home to find themselves knee deep in flood water.
Irish Times photographer Dermot O’Shea went out to photograph some of the damage and ended up being caught up in it. He described how people linked together and pulled each other out of a “raging torrent” of water up to 5ft deep in Ballsbridge when the Dodder broke.
“I have never seen anything like it in my life. It was quite frightening,” O’Shea told this newspaper at the time. Instead of photographing such disasters, he found himself caught up in one.
By the time he was released from the flood and got back to the office, the camera film had been destroyed by the water.
A few months after the floods, Dublin city manager Frank Feely wrote to the government: “While theoretically the danger of avoiding damage by flood could be removed by turning the river into a high-walled concrete channel all the way up, I doubt if anyone would be happy with a solution along those lines.”
Hurricane Charley had a traumatic impact on the farming community already suffering from two consecutively bad summers. Farm incomes dropped by 25 per cent combined in the years 1985 and 1986.
The cereal harvest was already three weeks behind when Hurricane Charley struck and only about 5 per cent of the spring barley crop had been harvested.
“Nobody can remember when we last had a spell of fine weather,” an IFA spokesman told reporters in the days following Hurricane Charley.
In Gorey, Co Wexford, train passengers endured a terrifying night as they were trapped in flood water having previously had to abandon their train journey.
Hurricane Charley turned out to be a political storm to add to the litany of political crises then assailing the coalition government of Fine Gael and Labour. Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald cut short his holiday in Cyprus and returned to Ireland to deal with the situation.
The government provided IR£10 million in relief for businesses affected by the flooding and farmers. There was much grumbling that it was not enough, but it had nothing like the resources to call on that the present government has when faced with such emergencies.
The concept of man-made climate change came about only in the late 1980s. Hurricane Charley was seen as one of those extreme weather events that occurred naturally.
It prompted Dublin Corporation’s spokesman Noel Carroll to say at the time: “People who live beside a river should expect to get their feet wet now and again.”
