Bill Parker who works in Coastal Management for Suffolk Coastal and Waveney District Councils has been using the slides shown below, produced by Environment Agency, when giving talks to show sea walls don’t work.
Guess what?
Bill and EA are right in the scenario the slides describe.
I’ll explain what I mean by this later but first let’s look at the slides.
Stage 1 – we start with a beach behind which there is some sort of cliff. The sea will wash away material from the beach and attack the cliff.
Stage 2 – A sea wall is built at the bottom of the cliff.
Stage 3 – the sea wall stops the cliff being eroded but the beach continues to be washed away.
Stage 4 – As sand and shingle is washed away you have to build an even bigger sea wall as the level of beach has dropped there is no longer a beach at any stage of the tide.
This is exactly the situation at Holland-on-Sea which I have been blogging about for the last 18 months. It is also true of the Naze, which EA plan to allow to fall in the sea.
There is something missing in the slides above.
Did you spot whats missing??
Groynes
Groynes
Groynes
Without groynes the sea will wash the beach away – just what has happened at Holland-on-Sea.
When the beach has gone, the sea will wash against the sea wall at all, or almost all states of the tide. The sea will undermine the sea wall by washing material from underneath it.
Exactly what has happened at Holland-on-Sea.
TDC’s current plan is to regenerate the sea wall at Clacton and Holland. But they are relying on funding from DEFRA and EA. I have a problem here.
Is it reasonable to expect an organisation which produces slides saying sea walls don’t work to fund building sea walls?
Is it reasonable to expect an organisation which doesn’t consider groynes important enough to even draw on its slides of coastal defenses to fund building or repairing groynes.
TDC have appointed Mott McDonald to produce a report on how to proceed with repairing the sea wall. Funding has yet to be secured for this work. It is not expected to start until at least 2015. This Mott McDonald report dated June 2009 states in section 5.1.3 on page 4-39
“The timber groynes at Clacton have such a high maintenance cost and are nearing the end of their lifespan that the Tendring Council have stopped trying to maintain them leading to major beach erosion and knock on issues.“
So Mott Macdonald, who TDC have turned to for advice, have stated in print that the state of Clacton (and Holland) beach is a result of Tendring District Council not maintaining or replacing the groynes.
I have been making exactly this point for the last 18 months. Others such as Joy Broderick and Trevor Bright have been doing this for even longer.
In this post holland-on-sea-and-tendring-beaches-september-2012 I show photographs of
- the sea wall failing in 2007
- a digger falling throw the promenade in 2011
Mike Badger of TDC stated the reason for the state of the beach is because of “the alignment of the coast”.
Strange Mott McDonald didn’t mention this, they just said it was the decision not to repair (or renew) the groynes.
I have two questions
- Will DEFRA/EA provide funding for new groynes – they have consistently failed to do so since 2001, preferring to spend the best part of £10million on emergency repairs to the sea wall?
- Even if funding is provided will the wall collapse before building work starts?
If TDC abandoned maintenance of the groynes in 2009 (may have been earlier) and doesn’t do nothing until 2015 then TDC have just let the sea do whatever it wants for at least 6 years.
To put this into some sort of context the report of TDC March cabinet on coastal defense stated on page 20 of the Royal Haskoning report contained within the TDC report, in the
‘Do Nothing’ scenario Defence Q is likely to fail
by 2020. Losing this section of defence means that within 15 years the coastal road at
the top of the cliff is rendered impassable due to the retreat of the cliff line.
What do you think?
Why not leave a comment here or at the Tendring Beaches facebook page. One advantage of using the facebook page is you can upload photographs.
