A technical issue that failed to notify thousands of Brisbane residents prior to Saturday's destructive storm is expected to be identified by the end of the day, Weatherzone's head of development says.
Many of the 132,000 people subscribed to the Brisbane early warning alert service, built in collaboration between Fairfax Media's Weatherzone and Brisbane City Council, were notified of the storm around 6pm, about two hours after the Bureau of Meteorology had issued a dangerous storm warning for the Brisbane area.
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Storm alerts come too late
Brisbane City Council is looking into an early warning system which failed to alert Brisbane residents to Saturday's storm until after it had passed. 7 News Queensland
The supercell left one teenager in hospital after he was struck by lightning while winds in excess of 100km/h left about 30,000 homes without power.
SES services were called out to about 80 jobs.
The free alert service, launched in September, was developed to give people more timely and detailed information about weather events, including severe thunderstorms, for their immediate location.
Weatherzone head of development Matt Pearce said his team were aware of the issue as it was unfolding on the Saturday and there were developers and technicians monitoring it in real time.
"They did implement a work around at approximately 5.30pm Brisbane time, which did accelerate the last number of alerts that hadn't been sent through," he said.
"Most users would have received their alert by 6pm, 100 per cent of users had received them by 6.10pm.
"Users would have experienced a delay anywhere between one minute and two hours."
However, one user said they did not receive a storm alert message until 7.12pm, three hours after BOM's warning for the Brisbane region.
The delay in the alert component meant some received the alert immediately while others, depending on where they were in the queue, received it about two hours later.
Cr Quirk told ABC the issue was up for discussion in today's civic cabinet meeting.
"We have to get it right," he said.
"We're coming into the more severe storms around later December, January and we need to make sure that things are sorted with the new entity.
"I expect a full report into the matter."
Mr Pearce said developers had been working "around the clock" to identify the root cause, which he believed could have been an issue with the alert system's access to Weatherzone's database.
"We believe we have identified the root cause and they are working on that," he said.
"It is related to the way the alerting system access our database layer, the database layer of the system.
"We conducted significant testing before the launch, but this problem did not become apparent.
"It may possibly have been related to a build up of a lot of history in the database which has only now become apparent."
Mr Pearce said they should know by the end of the day whether that was the issue behind the severe alert delay and assured users a manual workaround had been built in the meantime.
"We have manual work up backup in place, should there be another thunderstorm, that would take about five minutes," he said.
Weatherzone is owned by Fairfax Media, publisher of this website.