Farmers lead demands for urgent fix to BOM’s ‘full blown nightmare’ website redesign
The BOM faces new questions about its disastrous website revamp, which farmers and others say risked livestock and human life during extreme weather earlier this week.
Farmers are demanding an urgent fix to problems with the Bureau of Meteorology's website redesign, describing it as as “full-blown nightmare” placing crops, livestock and even human life at risk.
NSW Farmers president Xavier Martin told The Australian it beggared belief that the BOM would make such major changes last week when an extreme weather event was forecast for the following days.
“It was the last thing farmers needed to see when they were trying to deal with an extreme weather event bearing down on them right across a big part of Australia,” Mr Martin said.
“They were trying to manage harvest and hay making and moving livestock with graziers’ warnings, so it was just disbelief that someone had still pressed go on what farmers see as a disabling of their weather support.
“There was a major extreme weather event, during which people were injured and died, but when farmers clicked on that button they couldn’t make any sense of it – they thought they were logging on to a different website.”
Environment Minister Murray Watt conceded the new website was “not meeting users’ expectations”, while Nationals leader David Littleproud demanded the government to review the BOM’s redesign – its first in 12 years.
Mr Littleproud said people in his Queensland electorate of Maranoa were not given the information they needed after severe storms cut power to almost 100,000 homes in Queensland’s southeast on Sunday, downed trees, 370 power lines, and shuttered 11 schools in Brisbane on Monday.
In a statement on Wednesday, Peter Stone, the bureau’s acting head, said the new site was “intended to improve the long-term security, stability and resilience of critical Bureau services”.
“I acknowledge the concerns raised by the community and recognise the significance of the change,” he said. “We didn’t make the change lightly and we appreciate that it will take time for some to adjust. I sincerely apologise for the challenges the change has caused.”
Many found the new site unworkable.
“They went to get their daily or hourly updates and saw something completely foreign,” he said.
“They couldn’t find anything relevant to their area. They couldn’t find the essential forecasting tools they rely on. It looks like a full-blown nightmare. It is a dog’s breakfast.
“These are the guys (BOM) who spent millions trying to change their name a few years ago and made a huge mess of that and now they’ve decided to mangle their website and data and push that out in an extreme weather event that killed people.”
Mr Littleproud said he had written to Senator Watt asking him to “review the functionality” of the updated site and “consider restoring key tools relied upon by farmers and rural communities”.
“I am hearing from many locals that the new platform no longer allows then to enter GPS co-ordinates for their specific property locations, restricting searches to towns or postcodes,” he said.
The Nationals leader said the changes meant families, businesses and farmers were “unable to access vital, localised data such as river heights and rainfall information”, adding that others had also found it difficult to navigate the new radar function on the site.
Senator Watt also confirmed on Tuesday he had met with Peter Stone, and said in that meeting he had made clear the new site was “not meeting many users’ expectations”.
Asked why the site had been received by the public so badly, after the bureau said it had received positive feedback on its redesign after more than 18 months of testing and consultation, Energy Minister Chris Bowen said: “Minister Watt’s made clear that it’s not gone to his satisfaction as the responsible minister.”
He added: “The bureau clearly has work to do in that it has lost community confidence in the new website. Minister Watt has made his expectations clear.”
But in an interview with The Australian, meteorologist Anthony Cornelius said the beta site trialled did not include all the features that were rolled out by the bureau on Wednesday last week.
“But the issue is that when we were accessing the beta site, a lot of those features like the singular radar views … were still linking back to the old site,” he said. “So our assumption was that they were not changing.”
Queensland Premier and Treasurer heaped pressure on the federal government.
Treasurer David Janetzki said it had put the “lives and safety of Queenslanders at risk” during Sunday’s storms in a letter sent to Minister Watt.
Premier David Crisafulli said the changes “don’t make sense” and that the website was “flawed”.
Paul White, a Surat resident, labelled the new site “hopeless”.
“My main problem is that I have 6500 acres that go under flood waters and we have a gauging station that is 10 kilometres upstream from us,” he said.
“When we have heavy rain I monitor that 24/7 because I have livestock and machinery. But now, I don’t see any metre heights any more.”
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