At a Glance
- The town's childcare center had to be torn down.
- Large sand cliffs line parts of what once was Stockton Beach.
- City officials warned that the cliffs could collapse and cause loss of life.
The beach in one Australian town is washing away at an alarming rate, leaving dangerous sand cliffs along the shoreline and causing a childcare center to be torn down.
“People used to come home from work and kick off their shoes and get straight down there to put their feet in the water," Callan Nickerson, president of the 112-year-old Stockton Surf Life Saving Club, told The Guardian. "Now they’re just going down to see how much sand we’ve lost that day. It’s sad and it’s shameful.”
Giant cliffs now exist where the beach used to be, with portions of it shored up by sandbags.
Stockton Beach is adjacent to the city of Newcastle, New South Wales, on Australia's southeastern coast. The beach has been washing away for years, and community members were told at a meeting last year to expect the situation to get worse.
That happened in August and September, when ocean swells battered the beach for five weeks straight. One section of the shoreline lost more than 8 feet in height in a single five-hour period, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
“People really feel that the beach is part of their personality. But seeing it stripped away unnecessarily really frustrates people and makes them question if they are getting a fair go,” Save Stockton Beach founder Simon Jones told the Herald. “We’ve had bad erosion before, but we’ve reached a tipping point.”
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Jones started a Facebook page called Save Stockton Beach to document the damage. The page also provides a place for residents to keep up to date on the latest efforts to protect their community from the swells, and to advocate for something to be done.
The town's childcare center, sitting on the edge of a dangerous erosion-caused cliff, was torn down Friday.
As the summer season kicks off in Australia, the severe erosion prompted the city of Newcastle to send a letter to local school principals last week urging them to warn students on break not to get too close to the cliffs (or edge).
"The recent erosion events on Stockton Beach have created dangerous sand cliffs that have the potential for sudden collapse under zero weight loads, without warning," the letter reads. "This has the potential to cause loss of life, if people stand too close to the top or the bottom of the sand cliffs."
Video posted to YouTube showed the erosion dangerously close to buildings along the shoreline.
Residents have been battling with government officials to do something about the erosion, but a solution isn't clear.
Experts say that man-made infrastructure, including breakwaters and a deep water channel, have disrupted wave patterns and made normal coastal erosion cycles more damaging.
“We’ve interrupted the along-shore transport and, essentially, just blocked the flow of sand," David Kennedy, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Melbourne, told The Guardian.
“The developments we’ve been doing have reduced beaches’ natural resilience."
Rising sea levels that are expected to impact coastlines worldwide will also likely make the situation worse.
Andrew Short, of the University of Sydney, has visited every beach in Australia and concluded that buildings and infrastructure were built too close to the shore in many places, at time when “they really didn’t know much better."
Climate change is “certainly going to exacerbate any problems that we’ve already got," Short told The Guardian.
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