Building homes and units so close to the water was an „accident waiting to happen”, one of Australia’s leading coastal management experts said as several properties remained teetering over the ocean on Sydney’s northern beaches on Monday afternoon.
Professor Andrew Short said it was predictable that a major storm would pose a threat to waterfront houses at Collaroy and Narrabeen and for too long governments had put the problem in the „too hard or too expensive basket”.
„Collaroy Beach is the most at-risk part of the NSW coast. It has been at risk for more than a 100 years and essentially nothing has been done for those 100 years,” Professor Short, from the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences, said.
„This was the biggest storm in, you might say, about 40 years and it has eroded back in a very predictable way to what we call the immediate hazard line. It’s predicted those houses will be impacted by a storm of this magnitude.”
Waterfront homes were partially swept into the ocean and left dangling over the edge of sand cliffs after tides up to eight metres high caused major erosion and opened up sink holes along the stretch of coast on Sunday night.
But Professor Short said it was „nothing new” and would happen again if the government did not take action. Houses, he said, were swept into the ocean from a similar spot in Collaroy in the 1940s and 1960s after violent storms.
„Past councils have allowed people to not only build there but to massively overdevelop it with high rises and so on and so it’s been an accident waiting to happen,” Professor Short said.
„It’s time local, state and even federal government step in and say ‘Look, we have to do something about this’, both to maintain the beach for the public and also do something about those properties which are at risk.”
A series of sea walls has been haphazardly constructed along the Narrabeen and Collaroy coastline during the past decades, Professor Short said, but they were not properly engineered and most would fail when hit by major tides.
In 2003, a proposal to construct a sea wall was put on hold after it encountered widespread community opposition due to fears the beach would be destroyed.
The government has also introduced legislation to improve the way the state’s coastline is managed, requiring councils to make consistent plans and better prevent unauthorised works in coastal areas.
The minister said on Monday it was too early to comment on the quality of the sea walls along the Collaroy and Narrabeen stretch of coast and councils and waterfront property owners had a „shared responsibility” to maintain a healthy beach.
„I think it is too early to comment on the engineering aspects of the sea walls that have been installed along this stretch at Collaroy-Narrabeen,” Mr Stokes said. „Obviously what happened in the past is a matter to determine as we get over this initial disaster period.”
Warringah Council, which has now been amalgamated into the bigger Northern Beaches Council, had taken different approaches over the years in a bid to address the erosion.
Professor Short said the council bought properties along the beachfront and turned them into parklands in the 1970s and attempted to put a moratorium on redevelopment in the 1980s, but lost its case in court.
A Coastal Zone Management Plan, adopted by the council in 2014, made property owners responsible for protecting their property from the impacts of coastal processes.
„Council has worked closely with the community and with the state government to try to find the balance of public property and private property protections,” former mayor Michael Regan said.
Premier Mike Baird said engineers were investigating the damaged properties but it was not yet known if they could be rebuilt. Big tides are expected to continue to lash the coast this week, which will likely cause additional damage.
„It is clear the ferocity of this storm was such that the damage has been unbelievable up and down the coast. Regardless, anything we can do we should be doing obviously to protect,” he said.
http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-storms-narrabeencollaroy-teetering-houses-an-accident-waiting-to-happen-20160606-gpcjq6.html
