The federal emergency management minister, Murray Watt, has mounted a full-throated defence of the Bureau of Meteorology’s forecasting and weather warning systems, amid criticism that flood alerts were too slow reaching residents in far north Queensland.
Residents of flooded beachside communities north of Cairns, including Holloways Beach and Machans Beach, have reported only receiving flood warnings at about 9am on Sunday despite access roads being cut from about 9pm Saturday.
There has also been separate criticism of BoM forecasts that underestimated the amount of rain expected to fall over the weekend.
Watt told reporters on Tuesday that “meteorology is not a perfect science” and that “the water was moving so fast it wasn’t possible to update everyone as quickly as things were moving” as ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper dumped massive amounts of rainfall on the far north.
He pointed out there had been warnings for days that communities might facing life-threatening flash-flooding. “I’m here to say that we have full confidence in the ability of the Bureau of Meteorology in its prediction systems,” Watt said.
“The Bureau of Meteorology do the absolute best they can with the science they have available. I can’t think of another agency in the world that I’d rather be relying on to make decisions.”
Laura Boekel, a senior meteorologist with the BoM, had earlier said the weather system “evolved quite rapidly”.
“It was the rain rates that evolved very quickly over the weekend. So we used the best science to make those predictions, and we had to change that warning strategy quite quickly into the weekend as we got more information that those rain rates were likely to be higher than initially predicted,” she said.
The national emergency alert system sends BoM weather warnings direct to mobile phones during a weather emergency. The alerts are sent to mobile phones registered in affected areas and those in the location when they last accessed the network. Local councils also have their own alert systems, informed by disaster management committees.
Watt has admitted that warning systems “fell short” and that they would need to be refined in future.
He told reporters on Tuesday: “If there are improvements that we can make around warning systems, then we’ll make those.
“But again, I’d ask people to remember that what we were dealing with was a highly unpredictable, unprecedented amount of rain into an area of Australia that knows how to deal with storms, cyclones and floods.
“The water was moving so fast that it simply wasn’t possible to update everyone with information as quickly as things were moving. But I know that the bureau and all of the emergency services personnel did the absolute best they could.”
The Queensland state disaster coordinator, deputy police commissioner Shane Chelepy, said the speed of the flooding had created “a complex environment”.
“We are reliant upon – at early stage[s] – on text messages and social media,” he said.
“We know that the environment, once it gets water in it, we lose power, we lose communications. We accept that.
“During the emergency response phase, we had a large number of emergency services out there doorknocking. During the evening when we completed over 250 rescues from rooftops, we had members of the special emergency response team with night-vision goggles on walking through water, walking up streets, knocking on house doors, making sure people were safe.”
