Hurricane Stephen

Hurricane Stephen (also called the (Great) Boxing Day Storm of 1998) was an Atlantic windstorm that made landfall in northwest Ireland.

[3] The Met Office estimated that a storm on the magnitude of the one in December 1998 occurs around once every four years somewhere in Britain, and once every twenty at any given point, with the wind coming in a belt around 200 km (120 mi) wide.

[3] Large parts of northern England and Scotland lost access to electricity.

[3] Six electricity companies in Great Britain declared a systems emergency as a result of the damage.

[4] During this period the reactors were left without forced cooling, in a similar fashion to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, but the event at Hunterston was rated as INES 2.