THAT summer of 1966 (main image, far right, taken in Glasgow’s Buchanan Street), there was a cloudburst so dramatic that it made the front pages the following morning. Cars were submerged, roads were blocked, and shops were flooded.
A woman and her three young children had to be rescued when their car plunged into deep flood water beneath a railway bridge in Clarence Drive, Hyndland. A young boy placed a wooden plank between the car and railings at the side of the road. The woman and her children crawled along it to safety. Their car and another one were later submerged in six feet of water as police and firemen stood by to help other motorists.
In Patrick’s Castlebank Street, a motorist thought his car had been struck by lightning when a drain grating thrown up by water-pressure shattered his windscreen. In Elgin Street, Clydebank, burgh workmen were unable to cope with water that rose rapidly to a depth of two feet, marooning several cars.
Glasgow’s salvage corps were kept busy for several hours in the late afternoon, and among other roads affected were London Road, Crow Road, Great Western Road and a number of routes in Riddrie. Some shops in Prestwick and Troon were flooded in streets where the water level rose to a depth of18 inches,
In Hong Kong, heavy rains caused floods and landslides; 60 lives were lost, and 6,000 people were made homeless. Six people were killed in a landslide and floods after a heavy thunderstorm near Salzburg, in Austria.
Read more: Herald Diary
Fierce gales struck large parts of Britain on December 30, 1951, killing at least seven people in Scotland. Four of them died in a 100mph gale and driving snow on a mountain track at Corrour, Inverness-shire. Other deaths were reported in Glasgow, Kilmarnock, and Dysart in Fife.
An early morning train from Ballater to Aberdeen crashed into a tree that had been uprooted by the gales and fallen across the track near Culter. Some passengers helped train crew to remove part of the tree that had become entangled in the bogie of the coach. A gust of 101mph was recorded at Turnhouse Airport in Edinburgh. Families were evacuated from a condemned tenement in Partick after part of the chimney structure was blown down. In Bridgeton (top, right), a railway hoarding was blown over.
Scotland, in the last days of October 1954 witnessed what the Evening Times referred to as a “seemingly incessant procession of downpours”. After a night of torrential rain, residents in Creetown, Kirkcudbrightshire, sought sanctuary in the upper rooms of their homes after a cloudburst in the Galloway Hills sent water cascading into the village, flooding many properties to a depth of ten feet. Landslides blocked one of the main Glasgow-Carlisle railway lines. Landslides and blocked roads kept the emergency services busy. In one Glasgow street (right, bottom) Inspector Jack and Sgt Gillies, of Southern Division, measured the water depth to see if boats would be necessary,
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