Just as the haze is getting more serious – into unhealthy levels – in Singapore, the government agency responsible for monitoring the situation here is finding its website in just as bad shape and unable to cope with the demand for weather information from the public.
Inexplicably, the main National Environment Agency (NEA) website has been going up and down in the past two days. When it’s down, it simply reports “Service Unavailable” when you go looking for the latest PSI (Pollutant Standard Index) reading.
Whether you’re wondering if it is safe to go out with your kids or go for a jog without feeling like you have smoked a cigar, sorry, the NEA has no information on its main site when it goes down.
You have to figure out that there’s a separate site here at www.weather.gov.sg that seems to be run by the NEA. Alternatively, you can still track this on news websites such as The Straits Times or Channel News Asia.
But it begs the question: how reliable are important government services when you need them?
NEA should simply find out how they can handle the load from people visiting their website during “peak traffic” times like these. Whether it is monsoon rains bringing “freak weather” and floods to Orchard Road or the PSI level shooting up, the information should be much easier to access for folks here.
Perhaps they are conducting maintenance on their server every now and then.
NEA’s website has been up and down for more than a day when I wrote this. And the last time the floods hit Orchard Road, the site was also facing the same problem. Clearly, they struggle to get information out to people who need it during such “peak” timings. Twitter is great, but let’s just get the basics right first! 🙂
I’m going to disagree with Alf a little bit on this one. 🙂 Feel free to respond Alf!
Singaporeans always grouse about things that could be better. Yup, NEA’s website went down due to server load, but to their credit they got it up back already, and they apologized via their social media channels.
The one that I’ve been tracking is their official twitter feed @NEAsg (http://www.twitter.com/NEAsg). It gives constant updates every few hours on the PSI levels in Singapore, and it was used even when their website was down to server load.
Anybody who knows me know that I’m not big on our government, but setting my biases aside on various issues that I disagree with, I’m really pleasantly surprised to find that NEA used Twitter in both an apt and very timely way.
Plus, the people who send out the tweets know how to aggregate conversations around hashtags like #hazesg and #sghaze. Twitter is excellent for this kind of informational outreach push.
Also, when I started following NEAsg on Thursday late afternoon, they had about 2,000 followers. It has now jumped to 3,700+ followers as of Saturday evening.
Good way to get really current up to date info on the haze situation pushed to your mobile — if you have a Twitter client of sorts like my Friendstream from HTC — from an official source.
So in conclusion: Yeah, Singaporeans wish our government services could be better (and we should always strive for this!), but sometimes we should give them kudos for a good job done.