The draft South African Weather Service Amendment Bill, which has been widely discussed over the past two weeks or so, had its public hearing in Cape Town on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
The hearings took place in the Old Assembly Hall in the grounds of the Parliament and were chaired by Adv Johnny de Lange, MP.
Those who did oral presentations included, the Chemical and Allied Industries Assn., Centre for Environmental Rights, the FW de Klerk Foundation, the Society of Master Mariners of S.A., Weather.co.za, HAMNET and many others on the second day.
After going through the Bill and some discussions taking place, the presenter indicated that they were delighted at the response to the clause 30 A and that it was taken out of context. The fines and times in jail mentioned were the upper limits of any offence and he indicated that one could be fined as little as R5 for a minor offense.
However we then got down to semantics around the understanding of what is regarded as a ‘hoax call’, a ‘joke’, ‘exaggerated messages’ and what is defined as a ‘severe weather warning’. The sub committee also wanted to know how the Weather Bureau will clearly define what a severe weather warning is!
Hamnet was first up after the morning tea break. We outlined our history and summarised our involvement in disasters around South Africa over the past 30 odd years. We made a point of highlighting that 90% of all disasters around our country are weather related. Weather information to us is uppermost and critical.
We indicated our concern that if we are not allowed to discuss weather among our members, this would be a tragedy as we are a community orientated organisation. Issuing weather warnings is to the benefit of the community and it is not to the general public but to a group of well trained and disciplined operators.
Although most of our information is obtained from the South African Weather Service, we made ample use of local weather enthusiast web sites as they are extremely accurate and a good reference to SAWAS.
We also complained that we now have to pay to get accurate information from the Weather Bureau web site and felt this was depriving the general public of information as many cannot afford the fees – including Hamnet.
We indicated that to shut down, or deprive us access to all the other sources of weather information would be counter productive and creating a monopoly would be a tragedy to not only the country but to the public in general.
After the presentation, the committee – 4 members – asked me some questions regarding our operations, if we were a closed group, in other words not a general public broadcaster, how we are funded and did we feel we were better than SAWAS.
I assured the gentleman who asked me the last question that under the circumstances surrounding the lack of information on the Limpopo flooding from the SAWAS website, we had no choice but to source other sites for a better picture of what was actually happening in Hoedespruit!
He was satisfied with my reply!
Other presenters focussed mainly on pollution clauses in the Bill but two other presenters, Capt. Whitehead of the Mariners Ass. was concerned about ship Captains passing weather information from ship to ship and Mr. Joberg of Weather.co.za indicated that if the Bill is passed in its current form, it would contravene annex 3 to The World Meteorological Organisation resolution 40, which laid down guidelines for relations between various weather service organisations – internationally.
An interesting experience to say the least but the Bill is in is initial stages and Adv. de Lange indicated that a lot of work has been referred back to the committee and much discussion will take place before the final draft is ready for publication.
Reporting for Hamnet, this is Francois Botha, ZS6BUU.
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