FLOODS, rampant inflation and a recommendation to wear face masks again. Welcome to 2023. Richard Heath looks back on a not-so-happy start to the new year…
We had ticked into the new year, but the news still had a whiff of 2022 about it – as GPs urged Islanders to consider wearing masks to help combat a “perfect storm” of winter illness. The unlucky ones among us were battling either Covid, flu, RSV or another seasonal nasty. And the really unlucky ones had at least a touch of norovirus too. To help heal the Island, GPs asked people “not to mingle without a mask” if they had a cough, runny nose or soar throat.
There was, though, better news later in the month when the government formally brought an end to the emergency response phase of the pandemic. In reality, few Islanders probably still realised there was anything close to an ongoing emergency response, as life had pretty much returned to normal. But in a move that signalled that the dark days of the pandemic were (hopefully) over, the government announced that it was ending public PCR testing, closing the Airport testing centre, cutting the Covid helpline, deactivating the Jersey Covid alert app and ending weekly Covid data reporting. We were, though, still being asked to wash our hands thoroughly. And just in case those lessons from 2020 had slipped your mind, that’s 20 seconds, with warm water. And don’t forget the soap.
There is one type of news story that has been doing the rounds since long before Covid was born – the age-old tale of hire car meeting high tide. In the first week of January, a picture on the JEP’s front page showed a vehicle balancing precariously on rocks after going for a swim at Corbière. It’s not clear whether the holidaymakers went for the “full insurance cover” option at the start of their Jersey break.
Islanders who prefer two wheels were in for a treat, though, when the government announced its first e-bike grant scheme. In an effort to get people out of their cars, Islanders were encouraged to apply for £300 vouchers to go towards electric bikes, which are now so common on our roads that they nearly rival the number of diesel-guzzling 4x4s.
The threat posed by climate change became a grim reality on 17 January, when a day of torrential rain left Grands Vaux suffering some of its worst flooding in living memory. Dozens of people were forced out of their homes – with some being rescued by boat – as roads became rivers, leaving properties under up to 3ft of water. St Saviour’s Parish Hall was used as a base to provide evacuees with shelter and hot food and drink, and a Tactical Co-ordination Group was set up to manage the response to the disaster. Other areas, including Vallée des Vaux and parts of St Martin, were also hit by severe flooding as a slow-moving area of low pressure dumped more than two weeks’ worth of rain on the Island in just one day.
The graph on the front page of the JEP on 26 January could have been representing climate change, but it was actually showing that rarest of things – something which was rising faster than global temperatures. The horribly painful increase in the cost of living would go on to become one of the major stories of the year. By January, inflation was already at 12.7% – the highest level for 40 years – and although the rate would drop slightly by the autumn, prices would remain stubbornly high.
In the face of the huge rise in the cost of practically everything, the government and many private-sector firms were offering some of the biggest annual pay rises seen in some time. And in the first week of the year, civil servants voted overwhelmingly to accept a 7.9% rise, something which almost all pay groups would go on to do.
Towards the end of the month, tributes poured in for a young Islander who died nine years after being left paralysed in a car crash. Olly Newman was a popular figure among the surfing community, and the Peas and Glove charity was set up to help pay for the specialist care he needed after suffering multiple life-changing injuries when a car crashed into his vehicle on the Five Mile Road in 2014. He spent several years at the Queen Elizabeth Foundation – a specialist rehabilitation centre in the UK – before moving back to Jersey in 2019.
Two amateur radio operators helped to bring a search-and-rescue mission to an end after an old maritime distress beacon destined for the scrap heap inadvertently sparked an emergency callout. Signals from the personal locator beacon – which alerts the authorities to an emergency at sea – were picked up by a passing satellite. But because the ageing beacon was not GPS-enabled the satellite could only give an approximate location within 20km of the device. The Channel Islands Air Search plane and RNLI all-weather lifeboat were sent out to search and to detect the device’s “homing beacon” transmitted on 121.5MHz frequency, which would enable them to pinpoint its location. At the same time, Jersey Coastguard contacted the Jersey RAYNET group of amateur radio operators and asked them to determine whether a 121.5MHz signal could be detected on land in the area of the recycling centre at La Collette, as they had received information that the personal locator beacon had been discarded. Two members of the group verified that a signal was indeed coming from La Collette, and the operation was called off.
Depending on your point of view, it is a piece of architectural brilliance, or something that would be better suited to Blackpool promenade. But like it, love it or hate it, La Frégate was given listed status in November last year, forcing the Jersey Development Company to rethink its plans for a massive redevelopment of the Waterfront. So it came up with a planning application to take it down and rebuild it 200m away. But in the end, none of it really mattered, as an independent planning inspector would later effectively say the overall scheme was one big mess, and the project has now gone back to the drawing board.
