Residents count cost as 90mph gales sweep North Yorkshire (From Gazette & Herald)

Residents count cost as 90mph gales sweep North Yorkshire

GALES of up to 90 mph hit North Yorkshire on Saturday, uprooting trees and sending masonry on some properties crashing to the ground.

Thousands of homes were plunged into darkness as a result of the high winds damaging cables.

And by Tuesday, 300 homes were still without power.

An Easingwold man had an amazing escape after his car was hit twice by falling trees.

Andrea Bell said her husband Richard, 48, was lucky to escape uninjured when his Mitsubishi Shogun collided with a fallen tree as he drove to work along Stillington Road.

When police officers arrived to help recover the damaged vehicle, a second massive tree fell from the roadside and completely crushed it.

Mrs Bell, 39, of Rosemary Court, Easingwold, said: "Some might think this is comical, but it's not. I'm absolutely relieved because that's the closest he will get to a brush with death."

One of the worst-hit areas was the churchyard at Hutton Buscel where several trees were uprooted, one crashing on top of the century-old recently-restored lych-gate and another blocking the entrance to the 12th century church.

Malton's Saturday market was one of the victims of the weather and had to be called off.

Paul Weetman, landlord of the New Inn, Long Street, Easingwold, was waiting for experts to assess the damage after hundreds of tiles were blown from his pub roof.

Police were inundated with calls from people reporting fallen trees and wires ripped from telegraph poles.

The A19 road was hit by fallen trees in the Easingwold area and the A163 was blocked when a tree came down at North Duffield.

The A169 road at Kirby Misperton was blocked when a caravan blew over, and traffic on the A64 at Rillington was also hit when an iron pig unit was airlifted from a field on the road.

Malton firefighters were called to pull down a chimney pot that had been made unsafe by the gales at Langton Road, Norton, at about 3.30pm on Monday. A turntable ladder was used to reach the stack which was on the roof of a three-storey building.

Rubbish collectors were turned away from waste sites across North Yorkshire with full vans at the weekend, due to the severe weather.

All the county's sites, including the household waste recycling centres in Malton and Norton and the Caulklands landfill site at Thornton-le-Dale, were shut because of the risk to users on Saturday.

"We had collected all the rubbish and didn't know until we got there," said Keith Stolting, transport officer for Ryedale District Council's Commercial Services.

"Once people have put their rubbish out, there is nothing we can do. We filled every vehicle we had, and sent additional staff around in pick-up trucks, and had to leave them overnight," he said.

Eventually, the refuse collectors were able to unload at Harewood Whin landfill site in York on Sunday morning.

Mr Stolting said it was the first time he had known sites closed for such an extended period.

John Miller, recycling manager for Yorwaste, confirmed that all the community recycling centres and landfill sites across North Yorkshire were closed on Saturday, not necessarily for the whole day.

He said that meteorological equipment at the Caulklands site measured winds of up to 90 and 100mph.

He added: "Yorwaste re-opened the community recycling sites as soon as it was deemed safe for the public to use them. Our priority, as always, was the health and safety of any site users and we're not prepared to jeopardise that. We apologise for any inconvenience caused."

Some 40,000 homes across North Yorkshire suffered power failure many of them in the North York Moors National Park and Scarborough rural area.

Police said that fallen trees had blocked several roads and country lanes in the county and driving conditions were "extremely hazardous" because of the gales.

Updated: 12:20 Wednesday, January 12, 2005