As ex-hurricane Ophelia batters Ireland today with wind gusts up to 176 kilometers per hour at Fastnet Rock, Europe contemplates a future of previously unimagined super-storms. Met Éireann, Ireland’s national weather service, issued red alerts, its highest warning, across the entire country, causing schools to shut and transportation to stop as life ground to a halt. Power outages left a reported 120,000 people in the dark, according to the public utility provider ESB Networks.
“We’re dealing with something quite unprecedented here,” said one of the agency’s meteorologists, Joanna Donnelly, on Ireland’s public television station, RTE.
