The village of Carna in the Connemara Gaeltacht is the closest to the Mace Head Met Ãireann station.
When Atlantic storms hit, as they frequently do, Carna gets the brunt of it. The trees bent against the wind are testimony to this. Elsewhere there is nothing but rocks protruding from the dun-coloured heather.
Maureen Folanâs home is on the way to the seafront at Muighinis. She has been living alone in her whitewashed cottage for 43 years. She stayed with her son locally on Thursday night and returned on Friday morning to find the roof completely ripped off her home.
âWe have had bad storms, but nothing compared to this. This is like a tornado hit it. It canât be a normal storm,â she said. âI stopped the car in the middle of the road. I couldnât remember how I was going to start it again. I was in such shock.â
All the ceilings are down and water has leaked through into every room. The damage is gathered up in black bin bags. Outside the slats and slates are gathered under tarpaulin.
Mrs Folan has been widowed for 42 years since her husband Joe, a postman in Carna, was killed in a motorcycle crash. As a widow she could not afford to insure her home. âIâm just hoping and praying that somebody out there. Iâm just living from day to day. Iâm hoping there is somebody out there who can put me back on my feet again.â
The local secondary school, Scoil Phobail Mhic Dara, in Carna, has a 120-year-old Monterey pine tree in its grounds which blew down in the storm. It hit the roof of one of its prefabs.
It could have been worse, says principal Dara ÃâMaoilchiaráin. It could have come down on the schoolâs oil tank and gone straight through it â but it did strike the gas tank and the gas leaked away. âWe were lucky that the storm hit at night. If it happened during the day people would venture out to try to save something and Iâm sure there would have been deaths or injuries.â
Power was restored to Carna village on Monday night, but only 25 of the 120 pupils in the school turned up on Tuesday because they was no phone signal for them to receive the message that it reopened.
Meteorologists believe the area around Mace Head was hit by a storm spike during Storm Ãowyn â a violent, localised eddy of wind that caused the highest recorded wind speed ever in Ireland of 183km/h. Nowhere else in Ireland came close during Storm Ãowyn to that wind speed.
Mace Head overlooks a headland. It is the most exposed Met Ãireann station in Ireland and a large wind farm is planned 3km off shore. The storm flattened one of the fences which surrounds the station and bent another one out of shape.
Closer to the seafront is the Mace Head atmospheric station run by the University of Galway. The station was set up to monitor chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases which were threatening the ozone layer in the 1990s.
Storm Ãowyn is not believed to be the strongest storm to hit Mace Head – just the strongest since it opened as a synoptic station in 2003. The winds were off the chart on the night of January 6th, 1991. The manual anemometer literally ran out of paper and stopped at 105 knots (195km/h).
