[LINK] Message to those in danger received six hours late

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

Message to those in danger received six hours late
Dylan Welch and Paul Tatnell
January 12, 2011
SMH
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/message-to-those-in-danger-received-six-hours-late-20110111-19mrs.html

Tens of thousands of Queenslanders enduring Monday's flash flooding 
received the government's emergency warning messages hours after their 
area had been submerged under a deluge of brown, rushing water.

The messages, part of the National Emergency Warning System (NEWS), were 
sent after 8pm, six hours after Toowoomba took between 100 and 150 
millimetres of rain in 30 minutes.

That might have been because the technology used by the Bureau of 
Meteorology cannot properly advise towns of impending flash flooding, 
the chairman of the UN Commission for Agricultural Meteorology, Richard 
Stone, said. New technology could better predict flash floods and he 
urged the government to buy it because local weather ''is only going to 
get more extreme''.

The messages, sent from Emergency Management Queensland, went to tens of 
thousands of residents of Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley area, warning 
them to be aware or get to higher ground.

The NEWS messages are part of a $15 million program created after 
Victoria's bushfires. It was designed to give people more warning when 
potentially catastrophic natural disasters occur in their area.

Designed by Telstra, funded by the Commonwealth and operated by the 
states, it has been running a little more than a year and by September 
had been used 56 times, issuing more than 500,000 messages across four 
states.

Yesterday the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, confirmed that Toowoomba 
residents received no government warning because of the nature of the 
flooding. ''This was purely an emergency response situation with no 
warning at all, basically, to emergency services. We simply had to react 
the best way we could,'' she said.

-- 

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
email:	 brd at iimetro.com.au
website: www.drbrd.com