ULSTER’S authorities must get used to more freakish weather in future - and plan accordingly.
That is the message following the first study of how a Northern Irish council can cope with the bouts of extreme weather which the Province has experienced in recent times.
Gary McFarlane, head of the Chartered Institute for Environmental Health in Northern Ireland, said climate models show the kind of erratic weather, which brought extra-heavy downpours to Ulster this week, will increase in future.
He has just carried out a report for Omagh District Council into how global warming, and the strange weather associated with it, is hitting the authority.
Called a Local Impact Climate Profile, these are common in England, but he said this is the first time an Ulster council has ordered one.
It concluded that the council should change its IT system to let staff access it from outside the office.
The reason? In future, flooding or heavy snow is likely to force more of them to stay at home and work.
Mr McFarlane said: “What clearly we know is, based on science, these kind of events are going to become more frequent - and potentially, who knows, more severe.
“You can’t necessarily prevent these kind of weather events, but there are arguably things that can be done to help manage the impact.
“There’s an argument for improving the ICT infrastructure within the council, enabling people to work more remotely when these sort of things happen.”
After the 2007 floods hit the town, the council had to pay out almost £100,000 in flooding compensation, bankrolled by the Executive.
The report found there were almost twice as many payments to those in less well-off areas as to those in the richest areas, suggesting it is the district’s poorest residents who are likely to be worst hit by a repeat event.
Mr McFarlane said he had offered to do the report for free, in the hope other councils would take heed and commission their own studies into how extreme weather affects them.
As reported yesterday, more rain fell on Ulster in just the first half of this week than would be expected across the whole of September.
While the Province saw only minor disruption, England was inundated with floods, leading to evacuations in the north of the country.
Following a scorching heatwave in March, this reporter studied a century’s-worth of Met Office data for the Province, which showed a clear warming trend across the last 100 years.
Experts interviewed said that changes to the climate would make extreme weather events more common.
Just days later, Ulster was in the grip of a ferocious cold snap.