Daily Mirror front page: Lynmouth disaster

[Weather-history]

Here's the front page of the Daily Mirror of the Lynmouth disaster of 16th August 1952. 34 people lost their lives.

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Was it cloud seeding to blame for that disaster.

[Michael Winston]

Was it cloud seeding to blame for that disaster.

It would seem not: from Wikipedia; ''In 2001, a BBC Radio 4 documentary featured suggestions that the events of 1952 were connected to government cloud seeding experiments being conducted in southern England at the time. There does not presently seem to be any direct evidence to support such allegations, but conspiracy theories have been fuelled by rumours of missing or destroyed government documents relating to the experiments.

By extreme coincidence exactly 52 years later, on the 16th of August 2004 an almost similar phenomenon happened in a village very near Lynmouth. A flash flood occurred in Boscastle (Cornwall, UK), fortunately without any human victims but causing extensive damage to the village.

The hydrological setting of these two villages is very much the same.''

It would appear to be a terrible and tragic natural disaster.

Regards,

Mike.