General News
28 November, 2025
Beaches at risk
BARRY'S CORNER: Our beaches are under threat and likely to cost a lot of money to just cope with in the future.
Beaches are the interface between the land and a huge amount of unrestrained sea.
The sea is never still, and always there is movement and energy, forcing currents and waves to overlap and bounce off rocks, islands and masses of land.
One of the threats comes when waves continuosly wash and bash against immoveable objects, such as rock walls and boat protection enclosures, or marinas and bridges and roads.
Most of the structures built by engineers who often have no alternative but build in straight lines and the highly mobile oceans and wild seas try to restore the previous energy flow.
There is a lot of thinking going into this process.
Constructing the barriers and obstacles takes a lot of energy and dollars.
Shires and Catchment planners are constantly reporting any changes and look for assurances from agencies for assistance by farmers and specialty engineers.
Whatever they will carry out will be tested by the next storm and consistently for the next decades after that, and there can be many failures.
Having structures strong enough to withstand any storms is a seriously expensive business and takes a lot of planning.
With the sea level on the rise and future predictions of where we are headed with more rapid rises means many of the human assets we have created will be looking to cause some grief.
This is meant to take many decades in time, but the reality will be revealed in a shorter time space as any rise happens.
The continuous nature and movement of the sea creates many challenges to the foreshore sand barriers and sand can move further along the beach or open water and get dumped in a new site, thus making new sand dunes and filling deeper water, depending on the strength of the currents.
We get a bit worried when erosion forces soil, vegetation and structures get undermined and fall into water.
There is no cheap or easy solution to this massive problem, and we need to take careful attention to our future with the siting of future developments like roads, houses and even whole towns.
Any high ground might become a good investment.
Even now, considerable undercutting has taken place in a lot of directions and is under watch by road engineers.