The Hurricane -- October 16th 1987
The day after the hurricane, as Newhaven seemed to have escaped the worst of the storm and had suffered very little damage, my wife Heather and I decided to take a walk along the cliffs from Newhaven to Telscombe. However when we reached the Rushey Hill Caravan Park it was a different story where none of the caravans appeared to have escaped the fury of the storm.
Further along the clifftop were Houses and Bungalows with varying degrees of damage and it seemed that none of the properties had survived unscathed. We knew the occupants of one of the clifftop properties which had lost its upstairs wall on the cliff side, and they told us that the only thing left in the room was a ladies shoe.
Luckily we had decided to take the camera and now some twenty years on when looking at the photos which we took that day, it is hard to recall the ferocity of the weather which caused so much damage.
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The caravan site looks more like the Meeching Court site, at the end of Court Farm Road. I had a caravan there for many years before the hurricane. It was a miracle that there was no loss of life there that night.
I along with my colleague Brian Sims were the Telecom linemen for the district from Newhaven along to Rottingdean. We were called into the exchange at Newhaven first thing to help start the generators and then sent out to deal with dangerous wires which were down and then to try and put emergency phone lines back in service. Part of this meant making sure that as many phone boxes were working as possible. I was sent to the phonebox in the caravan park, and as you can see from the first photograph, I couldn’t even find it buried under the caravans.
We also had to get the phone/radio lines working that were connected to the coastguard lookout on the cliff top.
Then along with the rest of Telecom staff, we worked every day until Christmas Eve to fulfill the BT Chairman’s promise to get as many people’s phones back in service by Christmas as we could.
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