Storm Erik has left 1700 homes in Ireland without power

The wind is something else lads.

As we all know, the weather is pretty wild this weekend. Storm Erik is here, and it has resulted in rain, gale force winds and a number of weather warnings. In fact, Met Éireann even issued a status orange wind warning yesterday. This warning reads: "Status Orange - Wind warning for Donegal." "Southwest to west winds will reach mean speeds of 65 to 80 km/h with some severe or damaging gusts of 110 to 130 km/h. "The highest winds will be in exposed coastal areas, where these values may be exceeded at times. Very high seas as well with some coastal flooding." And now, it seems as though the effects of Storm Erik are showing. Gale force winds have left 1,700 homes and businesses without power, mainly in the west of the country. An ESB spokeswoman described the outages as "a normal winter's day for the service", but said that the "tail end of high winds" had impacted power lines. ESB crews are working to restore the power to the areas affected. You can keep up to date with outages on the ESB powercheck website.