Britain’s state broadcaster the BBC caused alarm on Thursday morning when its weather service predicted hurricanes across the country, forcing them to issue hurried denials.
The BBC weather app and website predicted hurricanes across the country on Thursday morning, with apparently every British region and its outlying islands seeing users confronted with a ‘hurricane force winds’ warning in bold letters as their weather prediction.
Carol Kirkwood, BBC morning television weather presenter explained the weather readouts were due to a technical glitch. She said: “we’re having a technical glitch at the moment, it’s showing wind speeds far too fast, in fact hurricane strength, and of course that is not the case at all so please do not be alarmed by that. And we are as you say well aware of it and we are on it, we’re trying to fix it right now, so hopefully that will sort itself”.
Even several hours after the fault first emerged, the BBC was still predicting hurricanes through its digital outlets.
The glitch may have been obvious at first glance to some when inspecting the speeds involved. In parts of the country normally prone to high wind anyway, such as the South West and the Irish Sea, windspeeds were predicted to reach over 16,000 miles per hour. Inland areas and the east still were due to get an alleged battering at 14,000 miles per hour.
This is considerably faster than not only normal hurricanes, which see winds of up to 200 miles per hour, but is faster than the speed of sound at 767 miles per hour, and even the speed of the 1,500 mile per hour storms on Neptune, the solar system’s windiest planet.
Yet while the UK is not particularly prone to hurricanes, given the broader news picture the weather alert may not have seen so immediately far-fetched to others. The top news story from the BBC on Thursday morning was, of course, the very real hurricane Milton which has made landfall in Florida, and just days before the British media was alive with reports of hurricane Kirk, travelling across the Atlantic to Western Europe.
On Monday it had been reported that the remains of hurricane Kirk would pass over southern Britain and north-Western Europe on Thursday morning — just as the BBC’s weather service glitch happened — and could cause 50 mile per hour winds. The storm was not without consequence though, with one sailor killed in France as his yacht was capsized, reports Le Monde.
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