Get early hail storm warnings

A text message warning system has been developed that gives motorists up to 10 minutes' notice of a potentially damaging hail storm for their area. And its first high volume test last night sent 70,000 messages just before golf-balls of hail lashed Melbourne. The Hail Automated Notification System (HANS) was developed in South East Queensland, but is available across Australia.

Paul Malt, director of IT for A&G Insurance, says HANS provides more specific warnings than the Bureau of Meteorology. "BOM issues a warning for a larger area, such as the whole of South East Queensland," he said yesterday.

"Where we differ is we take the targeting information to another level to track the cell of the storm that contains the ice, to measure the size of the ice and to then work on probabilities of where that storm will specifically track. "We will be much more targeted to specific locations within a region." HANS is available free to Budget Direct customers at their home address.

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The message to customers reads: "From Budget Direct: There is a high probability of hail for (name of the customer's suburb/town). Please take appropriate precautions and stay safe."

"At this point it uses the home address of the customer, but where we see it going is to potentially offer the customer the ability to nominate other addresses such as where they work," Malt said. "As people get more used to location-aware systems, our ultimate goal - if people are comfortable - is to link it to their mobile phone location."

"We're trying to give people a minimum of five minutes."From a safety perspective we don't want people moving their car during a hail storm. So unless we can give a minimum of five minutes warning we won't send out alerts. "However, we can't be sure how quickly the text message gets through the carrier's network to the handset.

"It's always hard to get a definitive answer on whether our warning was exact, but some of the feedback from our Melbourne customers was that they had the information in time and had been able to act on it and then received hail." Melbourne customer Diane Corckery received a text warning about 8.30pm at her Camberwell home.

"How impressive was that? Our cars were in the garage anyway, so I rang my daughters to warn them and they took their cars to an undercover shopping centre carpark for protection," Mrs Corckery said. "If you were out on the road it would be an incentive to get them under shelter quick. "

I have a Kia Rio only a couple of years old and my husband, Colin, has a Ford Mondeo which is also a couple of years old so we wouldn't want any damage to them."