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Most of this summer on Fladda has been focused on repairing the damage done by the storm and high tide in January. Fladda normally doesn't have to much storm damage because it is reasonably well protected from the south westerly prevailing winds by Scarba and also has a large rock outcrop to the South West. Most of the damage caused by the storms is strangely enough to the north of the Island and is caused by the swell sweeping around from the south west and the suction damaging the sea wall and the Jetty to the north.
Whilst I own all of Fladda except the lighthouse tower the jetties are maintained by the Northern Lighthouse Board which has meant that over the years I have had a lot of interactions with that august body. Suffice to say they have had to maintain the north jetty although the south jetty has been left to fall away.
One winter ten years of so ago most of the slate rocks on the north east of the Island were swept away in the gales and have never come back and ever since then the sea wall to the north and east of the Island has had a lot of damage in the winter.
As a note Fladda is complete encircled by a seawall built around about when the lighthouse was built (1860) which is up to 30 feet high in places and some 15 feet thick. This is constantly under attack by the sea and so a big part of maintenance on fladda is fixing the wall.
Anyway back to this years storms. These were unusual insofar as they were directly from the south where Fladda is very poorly protected and also the tide was very high so the amount of damage caused was very considerable. The force of the sea was amazing, slabs of concrete 8 ft by 8ft and six inches thick which were on top of the seawall some 15 feet above high water were ripped up and thrown 5 feet back, the slate retaining walls were thrown 15 feet into the garden and steel braced windows were blown in.
The most serious damage done however was to the seawall near the lighthouse tower. A hole about 20 feet long, six feet high and 15 feet deep was knocked out of the wall and the soil sucked out of the garden behind the hole to create a crater about 30 feet by 30 feet and 15 feet deep in the garden.
Clearly if this was left and there were any more storms then there wouldn鈥檛 be much left of Fladda so the first priority was to get this filled. The proximity of the hole to the lighthouse was also a concern, it would be possible for the tower to be undermined and lost which would not please the Northern Lighthouse Board. Normally they do an inspection of Fladda in May and leave me with a long list of things that I need to do however for some strange reason they didn鈥檛 do that this year, it could be they have enough problems elsewhere!
I will be detailing in the following blog entries the work that has been going on over the summer to fix the damage done by the storm and the trials and tribulations of heavy construction on an island.