Natural disaster-prone councils in south-east Queensland say the Bureau of Meteorology’s decision to axe its free real-time flood forecasting tool is a “cost shifting” exercise with “potentially deadly consequences”, with New South Wales emergency services also affected.
For nearly 30 years, the BoM has provided local governments, emergency services and water managers around the country with free access to Enviromon – a tool used to inform emergency alert systems which collects, displays and analyses data from rainfall and river level gauges for flood forecasting.
