Sand carting plea to save Adelaide’s vulnerable beaches, including Seacliff and Kingston Park
A MILLION cubic metres of sand — enough to fill 400 Olympic-size swimming pool — is needed to replenish Adelaide’s most popular beaches, says the agency charged with looking after the state’s coastline.
A MILLION cubic metres of sand — enough to fill 400 Olympic-size swimming pools — should be carted to Holdfast Bay beaches to bring them back to good health, according to the agency charged with looking after the state’s coastline.
However, there is no money for the work, and a leading coastal geologist says better sand management is what is needed in the long term, not just more sand.
Environment Department coastal programs team leader James Guy told Holdfast Bay Council last week the Coast Protection Board would next year seek State Government funding for a million cubic metres of sand to replenish local beaches denuded by longshore drift.
“One of the things the board is seeking from the government is funding to implement that extra sand,” Mr Guy said.
He did not say how much it would cost to do it.
The extra sand would be on top of the ongoing sand pumping and trucking of about 80,000 cubic metres per year.
This counteracts the push by the ocean which naturally drags sand towards the top of Gulf St Vincent.
Mr Guy told the meeting that while the department tried to move as much sand back south as it could, much of it escaped past the Lefevre Peninsula and would need to be replaced by external sources.
However, he said previous sources of sand, such as quarries, were now too expensive.
Geologist and coastal expert Dr Ian Dyson was invited to speak at the meeting after raising concerns at the Local Government Association that Adelaide might end up with three “pocket beaches” because of erosion and poor planning.
These would be at Glenelg, Henley Beach and Semaphore.
Dr Dyson told last week’s meeting the government had not done enough to bring sand north of Grange back to the “sand starvation” beaches at Kingston Park and Seacliff.
While this would help to some degree, he said solutions needed to be found to fit each individual beach so they could all have “healthy” profiles, similar to what they had before settlement in the 1800s.
“What are you going to do? Increase the amount of sand that you dump?” Dr Dyson asked.
“It’s going to keep drifting away.”
He proposed doing a six-month study of Kingston Park to see what needed to be done to bring it back to “equilibrium”, where the sea automatically replenished the sand without human intervention.
After the meeting, Mayor Stephen Patterson said he would like to see a “working party” set up involving Dr Dyson, similar to one recently formed at Charles Sturt Council to look at solutions to keeping sand on Holdfast Bay beaches, particularly Kingston Park.
Environment Minister Ian Hunter said he had been “talking to the Coast Protection Board about a number of projects” to replenish sand on Adelaide’s beaches.
However, he said there were “no current plans to dredge sand from Port Stanvac”, a sand source Mr Guy suggested at the meeting.
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