Wet Wild Weather

The heat of the sun drives our weather, but water creates its many different faces.

I'm Donal MacIntyre.

I am about to follow water's journey around the planet -

from the oceans to the clouds, from a storm to a flood -

because I want to experience the awesome power it can unleash.

I'll meet people who have been at the mercy of some of the wettest, wildest weather on Earth.

This is Wild Weather.

We live on a water planet.

70% of the surface is water.

Every living thing, including us, is made of it.

Right now, there are 12,000 billion tons of it, literally hanging above our heads.

And it's this that fuels the world's weather.

If you were to divide it by the amount of people that live on the planet,

this is how much each single one of us would have -

a cube of water measuring 46m high, wide and deep.

The same water we bathe in that we drink or flush away.

It's the same water that rains on us

that forms the hurricanes and the monsoons.

It's the same water that's been here since the Earth was formed.

If all things were equal, this would be your share of the weather.

This is the same water that fell as rain before life itself began.

By now, it has probably circled around the planet over eight million times.

Now I'm going to follow the cycle your bit of water takes around the world.

Along the way, we'll see how it transforms itself

into every kind of weather on the planet.

I'm going to start my journey with water in the wettest place in Western Europe -

Bergen, city of rain, on Norway's western coast.

It rains here two out of every three days.

So what do you need in a city like this?

Umbrellas - lots of them.

-We have some special umbrella for little rain, lot of rain and storm.

-For every occasion?

-Yes.

This city is so proud of its rain,

they can it, and sell it to tourists -

because they've got lots of it.

Just to give you an idea, if I was to stand here every day and night for the next 16 years,

I still couldn't capture the volume of water that falls on this city in a single year.

400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water drench this place annually.

And crashing down on the roof of the average family house every month is a staggering 18 tons of rain.

That's 225 tons a year.

This place is seriously wet.

Which means that devious tactics have to be employed by weather forecasters to keep people happy.

Enter the blonde.

This is TV2, Bergen's local TV station.

Benedikte Rasmussen has the unenviable job of presenting the weather.

'It's not that difficult.

'When the meteorologist says something long and difficult, it's probably just going to rain.'

The longest period of rain was in 1990, and I know this,

because I've checked it. It turns out that it was raining

from the 3rd of January to the 26th of March that year.

That's about 83 days. And I can't remember,

but I think I was quite fed up of rain after those days.

THEY SPEAK NORWEGIAN

'Prediction is a fine art.'

-Benedikte, what's happening here?

-We're looking at how the weather will be tomorrow, and the days ahead.

-How's it looking for Bergen?

-I'm not sure. I think it's going to be a little bit rainy, but not too bad.

How are these maps created?

Um...I don't know!

Benedikte knows only slightly more about meteorology than I do, but the ratings show

that her smile and presentation keeps the audience happy and willing to receive

the somewhat familiar weather forecasts.

So why is this place so wet? Day after day, warm moist air

flows in from the Atlantic, hits the surrounding coastal mountains and is forced up.

As it rises, it cools, and the result is rain, tons of it.

Right this second, 18 million tons' worth of rain are falling somewhere on the planet.

And if all this rain from the rooftops is going to join it,

there is only one way it can go - into the rivers.

Yesterday, what's cascading around me now was a rain shower in Bergen.

Before that, it could have been a monsoon rain cloud in India,

or even a cup of tea from the Ritz.

Today, it's a river in Norway.

By tomorrow, it will have joined the North Sea.

After that, who knows where or what it will next become?

The water...on our planet...

connects us all... in truly remarkable ways.

All this water racing out into the North Sea is about to join a vast weather-making ocean current.

I'm going to follow its course to see some of the wettest, wildest weather on Earth.

But, in order to see where this current starts,

I have to travel north of Bergen.

There are many currents in the oceans that move water around our planet,

but there's one, a master current, out there in the North Atlantic,

that's the drive-belt of our weather systems - the Thermohaline Conveyor.

Every ocean in the world is connected by the Thermohaline Conveyor.

It's a 70,000-mile round trip that takes about 1,000 years to complete.

And, in that time, the water could have been part of every kind of weather,

in Scotland or on the Serengeti.

It takes a phenomenal amount of energy to drive this massive engine, the Thermohaline Conveyor,

so what turns it on, what kick-starts it?

Of course, to see for myself how it works, I have to get under the ice.

The secret lies in when this ocean turns to ice.

At -2 degrees Celsius, sea water begins to freeze.

But this ice is made of fresh water, because salt doesn't freeze, and it's locked out in the process.

So, the water around me is very salty, which makes it heavier, so it sinks.

As all these billions of tons of cold salty water fall,

they begin to flow south.

This sucks the warmer tropical waters up north to replace them.

This action drives a permanent ocean cycle.

From here, the route it takes is truly global.

As the cold waters plunge to the depths of the ocean,

they flow along the bottom and then around the Horn of Africa,

and after about 500 years, it begins to warm up.

The Conveyor's first stop is in the Indian Ocean,

and much later in the Pacific Ocean,

where the whole system then curves around and the cycle repeats itself.

It's hard to imagine that the next time anyone sees the water I'm swimming in now

will be when it rises as a warm current and laps a beach in India.

After a 6,000-mile journey within the Conveyor,

the water that fell as rain in Bergen over 500 years ago

is about to become part of the biggest rainstorm on the planet.

India hasn't seen a drop of rain for months.

Life is almost unbearable.

Well, almost!

But the monsoon is on its way.

Every summer, around June 6th, regular as clockwork,

these clouds sweep in from the Indian Ocean, bringing life and death in their wake.

How it works is simple. For most of the year, the prevailing winds come from the north,

then, as summer heats up the country, massive columns of hot air begin to rise and, as they do,

they suck cool moist air in from the sea. When these moist clouds break over land,

you get the fury of the monsoon downpour.

And that cloud there is the beginning of the monsoon.

In order to see what's going on up there,

I'm going to take a closer look.

I'm about to do something that apparently has never been done before in the monsoon.

I'm going to go up and experience the hot and humid monsoon winds.

To do that, I have to jump off this.

Whoo!

Flying up here with the birds is the most amazing and scary way of seeing the advance of the monsoon.

On a day like this, 75 billion tons' worth of rain clouds

will sweep across this coast and a third of that will fall as rain.

It's staggeringly hard to imagine that amount of rain falling anywhere!

Some of these clouds are ten miles thick and densely packed with water.

You don't want to be here when that breaks, so to give yourself a bit of protection and warning,

you have to know what turns water into rain. To do that, you have to look into the heart of a cloud

and, right now, that one over there looks promising.

So how does a cloud produce a raindrop?

Up close, a cloud is just a swirling mass of water vapour.

Floating with it are comparatively huge particles of dust and pollen.

The vapour is attracted to the surface.

They collide with each other, getting bigger and heavier.

It takes a million of these droplets to make a raindrop,

only 2 millimetres wide.

Gravity does the rest.

Monsoon downpours are epic. In just a few seconds,

they can bring inches of water crashing to the ground.

For this brief period in the year, the monsoon changes everybody's life,

a welcome relief from the tensions caused by the scorching heat.

When the rains arrive, India lets its hair down and goes mad for football.

The rain softens the pitches, making them easy to play on.

What I can't believe is that I'm 6,000 miles away from home, and I'm still playing in mud.

I don't know if the monsoon is doing anything for my game, but I know it's doing wonders for my body.

All this rain can actually make you feel good.

As water falls through the air,

be it heavy rain, a waterfall, or even a shower,

tiny particles in the air, called ions, become negatively charged.

This makes them sticky, which cleans the air by literally dragging dirt and dust particles to the ground,

leaving it fresh and clear.

The cleaner the air, the quicker oxygen is delivered around the body,

and it's this that makes us feel good.

Which is why the shower is where most of us have our best thoughts.

All this clean air has an another effect on the local population.

To find out what, I went to see my friend Antonio.

-Now, Antonio, it's raining heavily. I love the sound of this rain.

-Oh, yes. It's beautiful.

When it rains, it's like music. When it rains, you love to stay at home, especially when it rains heavily,

and a lot of people are...conceived during this time. It's what I feel.

-So the rain brings babies, too?

-Maybe!

Lots of water babies.

Nine months after the monsoon, the birth rate leaps.

It's an intense period, because in a few months' time,

the monsoon breezes rushing in from the sea will reverse themselves,

leaving just the merciless heat of the sun.

India only manages to hold on to 10% of all that rain.

The rest leaves the country by the thousands of rivers and streams

that break its shores.

Every second, billions of gallons pour into the oceans

to rejoin that great weather-maker, the Thermohaline Conveyor.

The cycle continues, this time back towards the Atlantic.

The warmer surface current takes only 50 years to get there.

This is the same water that fell as rain in the last days of the Raj.

It's now about to become clouds in the USA.

But this time, they won't bring any rain.

This is Texas, land of big skies, and, looking at the crops round here,

you'd think big rain. But it doesn't rain enough. The clouds don't do what they should.

In the clouds above the USA and Europe,

all raindrops start life as ice crystals.

As they fall, they melt.

But here, it's so hot and so dry, the rain evaporates

before it hits the ground.

The average cloud weighs about 25 tons and contains about seven fire-trucks' worth of water.

But not all of them will rain. Some just evaporate, and many last only a few minutes.

Even if there's plenty of water in a cloud, there's often a lack of that extra ingredient to make a raindrop,

something for the moisture to gather round.

With just one corn field requiring 4,000 gallons of water each day,

and a single cloud containing just enough for one acre,

the question is - how do you tease the rain from the clouds?

Today, science and big business claim to have solved the problem,

and they found the answer in a freezer.

Back in the 1940s, scientists were trying to replicate the temperatures found at high altitude.

At -20 degrees Celsius, conditions weren't cold enough.

So to make it colder, they brought in blocks of dry ice.

At -78 degrees Celsius, the temperature was similar to those high up in the clouds.

It was then that scientists made a fascinating discovery.

Whilst moving the dry ice to the freezer, they noticed that the air became so cold

that the warm water vapour in their breath instantly froze into tiny ice crystals.

These crystals are exactly the same

as the ones that form naturally, high up in the clouds.

HE EXHALES

They are the frozen seeds of a natural raindrop.

I can see them sparkling and shining there. It's amazing!

This chance discovery led the scientists to wonder,

if they put man-made crystals that imitated the ice into the cloud, would the cloud produce more rain?

To see if it works, I went to meet the experts.

In Texas, they spend millions of dollars each year trying to make it rain.

This is the Hondo Airbase in southern Texas, home to a team from Weather Modification Incorporated,

the biggest company in the rain business. They've been hired by the water authority

to boost the dwindling water supplies. If demand from towns and farms continues at its current pace,

some people predict the water will simply run out in 50 years' time.

Jeremy Price has been flying this beat for four years.

We can keep a storm going about 25% longer.

That's about five minutes, cos the storms only last about 20 minutes.

-What difference does that make to farmers?

-It has a dramatic impact. We increase average rainfall per year

by a couple of inches. It doesn't seem a lot, but if you think how many millions of acres that's spread over,

it adds up to billions of gallons.

-RADIO:

-'OK, it looks like, from your location area, 135 at 20 from your current position.'

'135 at 2-0 miles. Roger that.'

What we do isn't magic. There's a lot of science behind it.

We're not rain creators. We don't bring rain out of nowhere. We go up and see rain that's already there,

and make it a little bit more. In Texas, usually in the afternoon, we'll get some heavy thunderstorms

and we'll fly through the updraught. That's where our chemical is most effective.

As we go in, we look for inflow, which is an updraught, sucking up air and feeding itself moisture.

We light our burners to produce dust, and the air being sucked into the thundercloud

seeds and creates the rain.

The burners release a chemical into the air, which is then sucked up by the storm.

I'm gonna reach across and turn on the left burner. ..The burner's lit.

The process is known as cloud-seeding,

and the seeds are tiny particles of silver iodide

that mimic the shape of the ice crystals.

When these particles are sprayed up into a cloud, water vapour freezes onto them.

They grow in size until they become snowflakes.

As they start to fall back down, they melt into rain.

Even if it rains after the clouds are seeded, detractors ask - how do you know it wouldn't rain anyway?

The rainmakers are shrewd enough not to claim that their techniques work beyond a shadow of a doubt.

But they provide a service which many satisfied customers happily pay a fistful of dollars for.

And yet many scientists insist that the evidence for rain enhancement simply doesn't stack up.

They say it doesn't work. But, faced with water shortages,

at least people feel something's been done, whether it works or not.

It's ironic to think that, trapped in the blue skies above us,

is all the water they'd ever need.

Just south of here, the people of the Caribbean witnessed the deadly power

of one of the biggest rain machines on Earth. This one had a name -

Hurricane Mitch.

Mitch was born on the 21st of October in the warm waters near the Equator.

The sun heats the surface of the sea,

evaporating one trillion tons of water into the air each day.

So, once in the air, where does it all go?

At about 2,000 feet up,

the water vapour cools, condensing back into tiny water droplets.

This is the dew point - it's where all clouds are born.

Each cloud is made of billions and billions of water droplets.

Carried aloft by the rising warm air, they billow upwards.

If the heat from the sea below is strong enough,

they grow into massive tropical storms.

The 22nd of October 1998 began as a normal day.

At the National Hurricane Centre in Miami, it was a day they would never forget.

Way out in the Caribbean, a major storm system was building.

It developed fast after it became a tropical storm. For several days,

we monitored this cluster of thunderstorms in the Caribbean,

but we knew it'd be a threat somewhere in the Caribbean.

In the capital city of Honduras, Tegucigalpa, people were oblivious to the gathering storm out to sea.

It was hurricane season, and this part of the world is used to it.

As it spun towards Honduras, sucking up vast amounts of water,

the wind speeds picked up.

At 75mph, Mitch officially became a hurricane.

It was picking up 2 billion tons of water vapour each day,

which inevitably has to fall somewhere.

On the 27th of October, it was business as usual in the capital.

We were in direct contact with the forecast offices

in Honduras, Nicaragua, Belize, Central America. In fact, it was so large, we knew it would affect,

with rain and winds, all the north coast of Honduras, so warnings were out 20 hours in advance.

The next day, Hondurans began to prepare for the worst.

Out at sea, the warm waters of the Caribbean fuelled the cycle of evaporation and rain.

By now, Mitch had been rated a Category 5 hurricane,

the most lethal on the potential-damage scale.

In Tegucigalpa, Pedro Funez and thousands like him

were on their way to work.

By the evening of the 29th of October, Mitch had already reached the northern coast.

The destructive power now is contained in the very heavy rains

released as the circulation interacts with a mountainous land mass, here,

Honduras, and Nicaragua here. It draws in moisture from the Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea,

and the circulation is so large that it's slow to spin down.

Mitch was so big that, while its centre covered the land,

its spinning edges sucked up vast amounts of water vapour from the Pacific and the Caribbean.

It then poured it straight back down onto the land.

The real disaster is really yet to come in terms of the mud slides and the very great catastrophes

that occur as a result of several feet of water being deposited over mountainous terrain.

The water racing down from the mountains was funnelled into the valleys at terrifying speeds,

wiping out anything in its path.

Residents watched in horror as friends and neighbours were swept away, with whole neighbourhoods.

SCREAMING AND SHOUTING

THEY SPEAK ANIMATEDLY IN SPANISH

In the capital, Tegucigalpa, mud-slides washed whole shanty towns into the river.

One of those houses belonged to Pedro Funez.

And this is all that's left.

TRANSLATION FROM SPANISH: You could hear people crying.

People began to scream. It all happened so quickly.

However much you wanted to take some kind of action, it was very difficult.

We were almost on the edge of the cliff.

I think they died quickly.

When the cliff collapsed, Pedro lost his entire family.

By the 31st of October, Mitch had disintegrated and the remnants moved out into the Gulf of Mexico.

The hurricane is both a miracle of nature and a monster. When a meteorologist looks at it from afar,

he admires it as a thing of beauty, and I think a lot of people, even non-meteorologists,

would say, "Wow, that's spectacular," but we recognise that, the more beautiful it looks,

the more potentially destructive it can be.

From the rubble of his home, Pedro was only able to find one body -

that of his youngest son, Javier.

On a quiet hill above the city, survivors pay their last respects.

THEY SPEAK IN SPANISH

Mitch was the most lethal storm in modern history.

Over 7,000 people killed, 8,000 missing and over 12,000 injured.

The death toll in this hurricane ranks with the deadliest hurricanes of all time.

This was a very, very catastrophic event and one that we hope will not be repeated.

An entire country had very nearly been wiped out

by one of the most powerful hurricanes the world has ever seen.

When it was over, billions of gallons of water drained away

into the Gulf of Mexico.

Having brought destruction to Central America,

this same water is now about to become a key source of the weather in Britain and Europe.

And this coconut could be rolling onto a beach in Cornwall.

To understand how, we have to join perhaps the most famous part

of the Thermohaline Conveyor.

Drawn out of the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico by the Thermohaline Conveyor,

the Gulf Stream runs practically the entire length of the North American coastline

before reaching out east across the Atlantic towards the UK.

It's 10 degrees Celsius warmer than the sea around it, so it heats the air above it.

All that moist, warm air is then picked up

and carried with the westerly winds to Europe.

Incredible as it seems, this massive river of warm water gives Britain and Ireland

the wet and mild climate we enjoy...so much(!)

We've known for centuries that the Gulf Stream exists

because, every day, the evidence is washed up on beaches like this.

Nick and Jane Darke are professional beachcombers and regular visitors to Cornwall.

After each storm, you'll find them searching along the high tidemark.

-Hi.

-Hello!

-Hi!

These are seeds which we've found.

-Where's this from?

-Central South America. It grew in a rain forest,

came down the Amazon into the sea.

The Gulf Stream even brought them a little piece of Honduras.

Six months after Hurricane Mitch,

we found an enormous number of seeds on this beach -

between 400 and 500, all different species,

which had all come up from Central South America on the Gulf Stream.

Everybody's at it.

-We get lobster tags from Newfoundland, from Canada...

-Massachusetts.

-This one is from Newfoundland, which we know took 14 months to cross.

-You've tracked this tag?

-Yes.

You can see the year, '99, "Lobster, Newfoundland", and the serial number

and, from the serial number, we traced the fisherman.

Some of the tags have telephone numbers, so I phone and tell them that a bit of their gear has come

from their side of the Atlantic into ours, and they're always absolutely amazed.

But what the rest of us want to know is what kind of weather the Gulf Stream will bring.

-'It's very cold, all day Sunday.

-It looks like it's going to be pretty wet across southern areas

'but northern parts will be dry, bright, with spells of sunshine...'

For the Met Office, based at the BBC, forecasting the weather and of course, the rain, is not easy.

The Gulf Stream is not the only influence at work.

We get reports from some ships and from some buoys in the Atlantic. Weather BUOYS, that is!

Helen Willetts, an experienced forecaster, is explaining the other forces that make our weather so wet.

The UK, being in the middle of the Atlantic, surrounded by water, is affected by many air masses

that attack it, so you have air coming in from the poles - a cold direction - and also we get

tropical continental air from the warm continent.

-From Africa, Spain...?

-Yes.

Also, we get our main weather from this tropical maritime air mass,

a warm source of air coming over the Atlantic, no land in between, picks up moisture, dumps rain over the UK.

Complicated! So how often do they get the forecast right?

Weather forecasters aren't famous for getting it right. We feel that you always get it wrong.

There is some prejudice and people always remember when we get it wrong

and don't praise us when we get it right. We get it right six days out of seven, which is about 85%.

But there's that rare moment when they get it badly wrong. October 1987 was one of those nights.

A woman rang the BBC to say she'd heard a hurricane was on its way. Don't worry, there isn't.

THUNDER CRASHES

Later that night, hurricane-speed winds gusting at over 90mph did indeed strike the south of England,

causing serious damage.

Even British skies can produce world-class weather.

And, occasionally, some world-class weirdness,

as Derek and Adrienne Haythornewhite found out one night at home in Accrington.

It were just a normal night.

It was fine. Nice starry night.

And, uh, there was no wind, no rain...

Then I heard this thudding sound,

like someone was shovelling, up in the garden or something.

Voom, voom, voom - like that!

Then I went to the back door, opened the back door,

and, to my amazement,

I saw these giant...balls coming from the skies, really fast.

I couldn't tell what they were. They were too big for hailstones.

-Voom, voom, voom!

-I said, "It's raining apples, or something! Something funny's going on."

And they WERE apples, hundreds of them.

The garden was absolutely littered. Littered, I mean littered! Over ankle-deep in apples, all sorts.

They weren't just one type.

When we examined them, there were Bramleys, Cox's, Granny Smiths,

russets, all kinds of different apples.

The only plausible theory about the Accrington apples

is that they were sucked up into the atmosphere by the spiralling winds of a tornado!

In the UK, twisters are surprisingly frequent.

In fact, we get about the same as the USA,

it's just that ours are small and rarely do any damage.

The increasing amount of wild, wet weather we get

is bringing terrible devastation to Britain.

But the real danger is not in the amount...

but in the speed it moves.

This is the Thurcross Dam on the Yorkshire Moors,

the perfect place to demonstrate that water only a few feet deep can knock you off your feet.

The force of water is always a shock, as this child and his rescuers found out.

What it needs is speed.

Beautiful, isn't it?

Millions of tons of water...

Power, waiting to be unleashed.

And they're going to dump it all on me.

I was wondering why there were four divers here, stunt co-ordinators, safety wires, pulleys...

-Then I saw THAT.

-We've got 14 tons of water escaping every second.

That's the force of two cars hitting you, and it'll push you over. That's what people don't realise.

Water can turn from nothing to THAT in a few minutes. To try and fight it is impossible. Even a metre deep,

once it gets above your knees, you're finished.

All water needs is speed and volume, and it has the strength of explosive.

'What we're going to do now is prove just how powerful shallow water can be

'when it's on the move.

'It only takes an hour of heavy rain to produce a flash flood.

'It's this that can wipe out towns and entire cities.'

-Good luck!

-Thanks.

-See you later.

It's just started -

our very own little flash flood.

And it looks scary up there! It looks really scary.

It's rising about an inch every ten seconds now.

It's really, really hard just to stand still!

I'll just see if I can hold my weight...

for a couple of seconds longer, but I think it's...

a lost cause!

It's only about three or four feet off the bottom and, already,

our very own flash flood has swept me off my feet!

Right now, there's not a chance that I could stand here,

let alone swim against it!

It's freezing cold!

And there's a constant for... a constant force... I can't talk!

It was so cold, all feeling had gone from my hands and feet.

But I was amazed at how strong the force of just three feet of water actually was.

If this had been real, I'd have had no chance.

The force of water in a river can be lethal,

but magnify that a thousand times and apply it to the ocean,

and the results can be disastrous,

as residents of Hunstanton, on the Norfolk coast, learnt to their cost.

On the 31st of January 1953,

a severe winter storm moved in off the ocean

and lashed the northern coast of Britain.

The storm swept around the northern tip of Britain and headed south.

The icy gale-force winds grew stronger as they were funnelled into the North Sea.

The sheer force of the wind piled the waters up in front of it,

causing it to surge like a bow wave. Waves of over 12 feet

crashed through the sea defences and ploughed inland, smashing everything in its path.

This storm would be a killer, but it would produce a hero.

US airman Reis Leeming was called in to help.

When we arrived on the scene,

it was night-time and we didn't know the area,

and, as I looked at this first street,

people were down in the houses and you couldn't see the houses.

All you could see was this water. It was like being in the middle of the ocean, really.

There was water everywhere.

The winds were gusting at 80mph as Reis struggled through the icy water dragging a rubber raft.

I took the raft and went through the gate that was here...

and carried it all the way back to the house, and I could hear the people, but I couldn't see them.

These people were on the roof, and somehow I got them.

I just don't know how we got 'em down and into the boat.

I walked up to this house. I got up to that doorway.

That doorway was open, as I recall,

and I took one or two steps inside and felt something on my leg.

Turned out it was the leg of a man.

It was a husband and wife, I found out the next day, an elderly couple, and they had drowned,

almost immediately, I guess, when the sea wall was breached.

Sure looks different now.

At the town hall, local nurse Dot Smith was waiting in vain for survivors.

The first woman they brought in, I didn't know what to do.

I thought, "If she's dead, the others are."

And, sure enough, they were drowned.

Two children were brought in next,

and I put them all together, on trestles close to each other.

And...then the father was brought in.

By the time I got down to this area to get these people off,

they had been on the roof of those houses since, uh...

4.00 or 5.00 in the afternoon. This was like, 11.30 at night,

with wind blowing 120 miles an hour, and they were soaking wet,

and the rain, and freezing water...

You know, it would be amazing to me

-if, out of the 27 or 30 people or whatever that

-I

-got out, that all of them survived.

After four hours in freezing conditions, the cold finally took its toll.

I was aware, late in the evening,

that I was freezing and I was at the point where I couldn't move my legs.

I remember thinking, "Oh, boy. You're in big trouble."

I had to hang on to the raft, cos it had people in it, and that's the last I remember.

I asked the ambulance men, "How long has he been like this?" They said, "We just fished him from the water."

His wet suit he was wearing had got torn.

I said to the chaps, "Has anybody got any scissors? We've got to cut the legs off this wet suit."

Somebody said, "His legs will have to come off."

And...that was really frightening,

because I thought, "Oh, boy, this is bad news."

Despite his injuries, Reis had rescued 27 people.

A week later, when news of his heroic act had spread,

he was in front of the newsreel cameras re-enacting it.

In the days that followed, 60 bodies were recovered.

Thousands of survivors now found themselves homeless.

I thought about these people.

I got a letter from a woman, and she said,

"You rescued me and my two sons... that night,

"and we've been trying to find you for 40 years."

And she said, "You'd be interested in knowing that the two boys..."

Um... Shit!

"The two boys... One graduated from Cambridge and is a professor there now.

"And the other graduated from MIT and HE is a professor of mathematics at MIT."

So that was neat, you know?

I never did see Reis again...

uh...and I never heard from him from America.

Almost a lifetime later, Dot and Reis are reunited on the seafront.

Hi there, young lady!

Oh, my goodness!

-How are you?

-Oh, Reis!

-Ooh, you've got a beer belly!

-Yeah! Exactly!

How long is it...? '53?

-'53.

-Yeah, when you were 19.

-Yes.

-And a slim little boy.

-A skinny kid.

-I know how slim you were, cos I took all your clothes off.

-I know!

-And you cut my pant legs.

-Oh, yes! Round there.

And you said... "His legs have to come off."

-I didn't!

-Well...

-I did not! I said, "THE legs have got to come off."

-Right.

-Which meant the legs of the wet suit.

-Exactly.

And, for 50 years, I've lived with that fear. I've awoken in the night

and remembered coming to and hearing somebody saying my legs have to come off, and I thought...

Well, you weren't very well at the time...

The memory haunts the survivors, as does their shock at the awesome power the weather displayed.

Fuelled by water in its many forms, the weather can bring life and death.

Hurricane Mitch washed away an entire country,

whilst the Indian monsoon brought the land to life.

The constant cycle of water that flows around and through us fuels the weather that dictates our lives.

Back where we started our journey with water,

the people here have developed a lifestyle that is almost waterproof.

Bergen, city of rain.

At the TV weather station, Benedikte is still smiling through the forecasts,

while out in the town square, these kids are at the annual rain festival.

The love of a good shower is instilled at an early age.

Life would be impossible if rain stopped play, so they celebrate it.

THEY SING "HOKEY-COKEY"

But today, something's not right.

It's not raining. Such is their thirst for the stuff, the fire brigade are pressed into service.

We have a saying in Norway. It goes like this -

"There's no thing like bad weather, only bad clothing."

'So, on a wet day, the four-year-old, little Ulrika, has a great time!'

It doesn't matter what the weather is. They are used to it.

CHEERING

The key to life in a wet world is to learn to live with it, love it.

Without water's endless cycle around the planet, there would be no life at all.

No weather, no sunny days, no playing in the rain.

In the next programme, I'm going to take a journey with cold, from the Arctic to the heart of a snowflake.

I'm going to be buried alive, frozen solid and plunged into the lethal white heart of winter,

to understand why cold is the weather's biggest killer...

Agh!

..and yet, without it, we wouldn't exist.

Subtitles by Graeme Dibble & Annelie Beaton BBC Broadcast 2002

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