Juliet Line<\/a> was spending hours on Tuesday visiting those cut off and trying to get utility companies and the highways department to reconnect people and move fallen trees.<\/p>\n\u201cThe lack of national attention has been frustrating,\u201d she said. \u201cStaff at the council and local people are working so hard but the scale of the problem is massive.\u201d<\/p>\n
Line believes the crisis highlights a lack of resilience. \u201cThe internet-based phone systems, for example, just don\u2019t work when something like this happens. People don\u2019t even know if help is coming.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018The lack of national attention has been frustrating,\u2019 says the local councillor Juliet Line. Photograph: Jim Wileman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
Andrew George, the MP for St Ives, said those trying to get Cornwall back on its feet were overwhelmed. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t help if power and water suppliers feel obliged to present an \u2018everything is under control, so don\u2019t worry\u2019 coping message, but that\u2019s not the impression I get when out talking to those affected,\u201d he said. He has called for a national emergency to be declared and for extra resources to be ploughed into Cornwall.<\/p>\n
One man died in Cornwall when a tree fell on to his caravan, and George said he worried there could have been other, as yet undiscovered, deaths. \u201cPeople are feeling traumatised,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Cornwall council said seven schools remained closed on Tuesday and its highways teams were responding to about 1,000 incidents across Cornwall, many involving fallen trees and branches.<\/p>\n
The National Grid said that by Tuesday afternoon 168 properties remained without power in west Cornwall owing to Storm Goretti. South West Water said \u201cfewer than 100\u201d were still experiencing loss of water or low pressure.<\/p>\n
The village of Goldsithney, close to Penzance, was cut in two by a tree that fell across the main street and on to a cottage roof. The family who lived there had a narrow escape.<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s the state of the country\u2019: Harry Glasson in front of the fallen tree lying across the main road in Goldsithney. Photograph: Jim Wileman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
\u201cThe mother and three children were downstairs,\u201d said a neighbour, Harry Glasson. \u201cIf it had been a few hours later they\u2019d have been in bed and may not have survived.\u201d He was not surprised the tree still lay across the village\u2019s main street. \u201cIt\u2019s the state of the country,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Fallen trees have made driving hazardous. Oona Burch, a school governor, told how she got stuck thanks to a combination of mud and a fallen tree as she drove her five- and seven-year-old children. \u201cThere was no phone signal and I was just thinking: what am I going to do?\u201d She managed to extricate herself.<\/p>\n
She said farmers cleared the way to her school with chainsaws. \u201cThere\u2019s been no sort of national response. We\u2019ve still got blocked roads five days after the storm.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cost is not just a human one. The storm felled almost 100 trees on St Michael\u2019s Mount near Penzance \u2013 approximately 80% of the island\u2019s trees \u2013 along with many much-loved camellias, hydrangeas and rhododendrons.<\/p>\n
Jan Shearn: \u2018God knows when we\u2019ll be back to normal.\u2019 Photograph: Jim Wileman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n
The National Trust said hundreds of thousands of pounds\u2019 worth of damage had been done. The charity\u2019s director for the south-west, Ian Marsh, said: \u201cIn terms of breadth and scale, this is the worst storm I\u2019ve seen in my 16 years with the National Trust. Tenants and properties have lost power and water, roads are impassable and many thousands of trees have been damaged. It will take months of work to get some of our woodlands open and accessible again.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the House of Commons, the Cabinet Office minister Dan Jarvis said he could give a \u201ccategoric assurance\u201d that the government cared as much about Cornwall as the rest of the country.<\/p>\n
He said he realised that coastal and rural communities were vulnerable but said he believed the local resilience forum had worked well and it had not been deemed necessary to convene Cobra, the government\u2019s crisis response committee.<\/p>\n
Jarvis said lessons would be learned from what Cornwall had experienced and the government would look at the issue of people being cut off when phones that relied on the internet did not work.<\/p>\n
Back at New Mill, Jan Shearn, 80, a retired headteacher, said local people had worked together to make sure everyone was safe, if not always very warm. \u201cGod knows when we\u2019ll be back to normal,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Linda Williams, 86, has been without heating, lighting and a working phone for the best part of five…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-367736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}