SYDNEY, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- Furious mayors in Australia's Queensland criticized the Bureau of Meteorology for failing to warn people of heavy rainfall in the southeastern part of the state, local media reported on Saturday.
Brisbane has been hit by some of the heaviest rainfall since the devastating 2022 floods with more than 180 mm recorded at Paddington overnight, while other suburbs and parts of the Gold Coast and Moreton Shire received more than 150 mm, according to local newspaper The Courier-Mail.
Angry mayors said their councils were caught out by the huge deluge and slammed the Bureau of Meteorology, which was also accused of failing to provide adequate alerts for other recent events including the Gold Coast and Logan storm catastrophe and devastating North Queensland floods in December, the report said.
"Many Brisbane residents are rightly asking why they went to bed on Thursday night with the Weather Bureau predicting moderate falls, only to wake to a massive deluge," Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner was quoted as saying.
"No-one is saying weather forecasting is easy, but there's been too many recent examples of massively wrong forecasts this summer," he said.
Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate said it was at least the third time in two months that the city had been "caught short" by Bureau of Meteorology warnings, the Australian news channel Sky News reported.
"I woke up and I went 'Oh my God'," he said.
The bureau's senior forecaster Daniel Hayes blamed a coastal trough that formed without warning for why the deluge wasn't predicted earlier, The Courier-Mail said. ■
