It may be that some of us are a bit distracted and disrupted in the coming days – but you should not notice much (if anything) in terms of the service provided to you.
You should keep an eye on the Global-Roam Status Page for more updates.
About TC Alfred
It’s not very often at all that Brisbane gets to feel the impact of a Tropical Cyclone … though in a warming world that might be becoming more frequent in future. So it’s been with interest and nervousness that we (along with a couple million other people) have been watching the progressive news updates.
Early this morning (Monday 3rd March 2025) one of the Meteorologists I follow on LinkedIn (and also a Brisbane resident) Anthony Cornelius posted this update on LinkedIn:
As per the annotation, there are two key points I gleaned from this:
1) There are a few different weather forecast model in use, and they were not all in 100% alignment at that time (with respect to rainfall expectations).
2) Some of the models showed a significant level of rainfall forecast for the Brisbane area and (importantly) the upstream catchment areas feeding into the Brisbane River. Of the same order as what we saw in the flood event of 2022 (noted below).
This afternoon one of our team used our subscription to Windy.com to produce this image – a forecast showing possible landfall at Brisbane early on Friday morning 7th March:
But remember the old saying that ‘all forecasts are bound to be wrong in some way … but some might be useful’.
For residents in and around South-East Queensland and northern NSW, it seems that the approaching TC Alfred is likely to have three impacts:
Impact 1) Storm surges and coastal erosion etc…
Impact 2) High wind speeds, probably leading to trees and other structures being down – and contributing to power outages as a result.
Impact 3) Heavy rainfall will contribute to localised flash flooding but also potentially more endemic riverine flooding in locations near the Brisbane River and its tributaries.
Each person is likely to be concerned about these possible impacts in different order of severity … for us, having experienced flooding on two occasions in the past (both taking power supplies out for about a week) we’re conscious that this will be a risk this time as well.
Past Experiences
Whilst what we experience in the coming days might be somewhat different to prior experiences, there may be be some similarities as well.
A few weeks ago now we wrote about ‘Reflecting on our 25th year of service (at January 2025)’ and also noted about these experiences in this update on LinkedIn, which sparked a bit of a conversation (online and offline).
1) In that update we noted how we’d started life borrowing some space in an office in Taringa – we then moved to Toowong for a while but have been in various locations in Milton for almost 18 years now.
2) Being a Brisbane riverside suburb normally has many bonuses in terms of a place to work not quite in the CBD (a relaxed environment and a peaceful CityCat or bicycle ride in to work each day etc), but sometime it has its drawbacks …
(a) we’ve already had two experiences of having the office powered down for about a week at a time …
i. In the Brisbane floods of 2011; and also
ii. In the Brisbane floods of 2022. Following that second experience we wrote about ‘Improving our organisational resilience through two Brisbane floods’.
(b) Through both prior experiences, service to our clients continued seamlessly (testament to the redundancy we’ve built into our processes) – though it also seemed inevitable that:
i. Software development velocity slowed for a short period of time
ii. At least in part because some of the team were helping out family, friends and neighbours in flood-affected suburbs.
Given our ongoing drive to continue improving, we’ve been thinking through the lessons of the past, and near term forecasts, to understand if we can be better still.
Should we experience something similar in 2025, we’ll appreciate your understanding.