BYRON SHIRE Council will be undertaking another beach scraping program at New Brighton beach between October and December this year to help protect the dune system against short to medium-term erosion and inundation.
A combination of bulldozers and excavators will be brought in to do the work along approximately 1.3km of beach north and south of Strand Avenue.
Chloe Dowsett, Byron Shire Council’s Coastal Biodiversity Coordinator, said the beach at New Brighton is particularly prone to erosion and beach scraping has been shown to improve the width of the beach, size and volume of the dunes.
“This provides protection to infrastructure and property against coastal erosion and inundation when we have storm events or large and damaging waves,” Ms Dowsett said.
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“It’s not a long-term solution to the coastal erosion problem and on-going shoreline recession but scraping the sand from the inter-tidal area up to the foredune area helps increase the size of dunes and provides a buffer,” she said.
“Beach scraping was successfully completed at New Brighton in 2010 and 2013 and a grant of $61,000 from the NSW Government’s Coastal and Estuary Grants program, which will be matched by Council funds, is allowing us to do some more work in this area prior to summer.
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“We are aware there are sometimes threatened birds and marine animals including turtles in this area and we will have an ecologist present who will be doing daily surveys prior to the start of work each day.
“We will also be planting native vegetation to stabilise the dunes and fencing certain sections to minimise damage to the dunes and plants.
“We are asking residents and visitors to use the formal beach access paths to prevent the trampling of new plants and allow them to get established,” Ms Dowsett said.
Pedestrian access on the beach will be restricted during the project because of the heavy machinery.
Are the owners of the beach-front property paying extra rates to pay for this since it all it does is temporarily protect their land? Why should rate payers who bought away from erosion zones have to subsidise their lifestyle?
If their property wasn’t in the way of the normal erosion process as the sea level rises at about 3mm per year & the coast receeds at about 300mm per year then this would not be necessary.
Rather than continually paying for a losing battle, Byron Shire Council should be planning the retreat as the sea level rises. There should be a clause in all real estate contracts & notices in our rates letters educating residents and incoming unaware people thinking of buying low lying property about the risk of erosion & flooding and putting all liability onto the land owners instead of expecting other ratepayers to pick up the tab for protecting their properties.