Re: Flood warnings (calling Philip Eden)

"Peter Moylan" <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 01/02/08 00:46, Philip Eden wrote:

Yes, Peter, it was. It was very important for all national weather
services in the early days to establish networks of observing sites to
provide routine rudimentary weather observations (pressure, temperature,
wind) to enable the forecasters to prepare their
synoptic charts. In countries with large areas sparsely inhabited
such as Australia this presented some difficulty, but the postal
service had a ready-made network which the BOM piggy-backed on. Who
persuaded whom, and how, must also be an interesting story ... well
interesting to me, anyway.

In Australia it wouldn't have been too difficult. Both the weather
bureau and the post office were owned by the federal government, so it
would no doubt have been a matter of one minister having a chat with
another.

I suspect the post-office based weather network was established very
early in the last century (doesn't BOM celebrate its centenary
some time this year?) and may even date back to the independent
state services. I wouldn't be surprised if the wonderfully eccentric
Clement Wragge (instigator of the Ben Nevis observatory, and
sometime director of the Queensland Meterological Department)
had something to do with it.

Since those days, things have changed a little. The post office was
broken up into Telecom (telephony and telegraphy: profitable) and
Australia Post (mail: unprofitable). When I was doing the local weather
measurements, the recording station was part of the local telephone
exchange, which was part of the post office at the time. Nowadays, I
imagine, Australia Post is under the sorts of financial pressures that
would prevent it from doing a favour to an unrelated public agency.
Meanwhile, the phone system has been privatised, but that's another story.

I have lived through a period where both federal and state governments
have sold off public assets for a short-term gain and a long-term loss.
This period will soon come to an end, because there's not much left to
sell. At present our state government is proposing to sell off the
electrical power stations. My experience from looking at what has
happened in neighbouring states and countries is that this will not be a
pleasant experience. First, the accountants will look at the
profit-and-loss figures, and raise the price of electricity to the
consumers. (But increase the dividends to the shareholders, most of whom
will reside outside the country.) Next, those same accountants will
notice that the maintenance division is not making a profit, so all the
maintenance workers will be sacked. Third, everyone will be taken by
surprise a few years down the track, when the whole system collapses and
it turns out that there's nobody left who knows how to solve the problem.

Join the club! Accountants ... they know the price of everything, etc.
Whoops, we don't have any round here, do we? [Sneaks off into the
undergrowth]

pe


.

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