The moment one of the cooling towers at Fiddler's Ferry was blown down

The UK was hit by a massive storm with disruption seen across the country.

At Fiddler's Ferry, the early morning storm was so bad that a violent gust of wind hit the power station and one of its cooling towers was blown down.

Heather Heam, from Warrington, sent these dramatic pictures in to us at Looking Back.

She said: "The photos were taken of the boiler house roof by my husband who worked at Fiddler's during that time.

"The wind sucked the air out of the tower and it collapsed in on itself."

The tower was later rebuilt.

The tower was blown down

Fiddler’s Ferry opened in 1971, with a generating capacity of just under 2000 megawatts, enough to power two million homes. It closed on March 31 last year. The cooling towers are 374ft high and can be seen from the Peak District.

There is no firm date for when demolition, which is scheduled to take between 40 and 50 months to compete, will start.

There is also no plan yet for the land.

But more than 1,300 new homes are proposed to be built on green belt land at the power station site by 2038 should Warrington's current draft local plan be approved.

Recent changes have enabled the council to include proposals which ‘further maximise the opportunity to repurpose land’ through the inclusion of the Fiddlers Ferry site for development.

The closure of the power station in March 2020 has given the council the opportunity to bring the site into the allocation this time.

Under the new plans, the huge Fiddlers Ferry site has been earmarked for 1,310 homes in the green belt, along with 101 hectares of employment land on brownfield land, during the plan period.