SEMP… The process drags on!
Sue Brooks January 15th, 2012
Council is pushing ahead with the SEMP or shoreling management plan even while we aren’t actually pushing much sand around our coast line. The latest stage of this large document is now available for public perusal and input. You can find links to the SEMP progress on the Council home page or via this link
http://www.frasercoast.qld.gov.au/web/guest/semp
I know it is still holiday time for a lot of you and I have already had the opportunity to provide some input but while the weather is wet and entices us indoors maybe this is an ideal time to catch up on some SEMP reading and write a submission?
The main point I will be making is that we need solutions regardless of the current State Government legislation. If the SEMP only provides solutions to erosion based on current State Government Legislation we may be short changing ourselves.. I want to know what are the best engineered and environmentally responsible solutions to our coastal erosion regardless of what we are ‘allowed’ to do or not! We don’t want to spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on solutions simpy because of State Government red tape. My idea is to change the State Legislation to make it meet our needs.
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How typical this all is of 21st century Government procedures. Hire a consultant; prepare umpteen reports running ointo hundreds of pages of bumf; circulate them for a year or two; spend a few thousand ( or million) dollars. DO absolutely nothing. Except that in our case we ‘create employment’ by bulldozing and trucking some cubic metres of sand up and down beaches so that the tides and currents can take them back again. As in Gatakers Bay where the flash new boat ramp will slide westwards into the water if something more effective is not done to stop scouring out of the base beneath it
What is needed is to realise that when you stick something into the shoreline – a marina, a pier, a boat launching ramp, it changes the deployment of sand by the only real mover of sand – natural currents and wave and tide forces – and design them properly in the first place not just throw something up and hope ‘she’ll be right’ .
Exactly Colin, Are we having all this trouble because the Hervey Bay Council allowed those apartments to be built on reclaimed land at Sandy Straits, yes of course we are. Would love to know who the councilors/mayor were at this time. They have a lot to answer for.
I am sure with the benefit of hindsight some things would possily be done differently. Belatedly the State Government is slowly turning development away from low lying coastal land. But regardless of what has gone before we do need to address coastal erosion along parts of our urban coastline. We are stuck with State Givernment requirements that demand consultant reports etc. I think people often forget that Council is a child of and beholden to State Government. It is not Council’s choice that we have to jump through these hoops!
Sue,
I know of no where, where sea erosion has been stopped without it creating problems else where.
Our coast line, as with coast lines every where are undergoing constant change, always have and
always will.
Sand pushes, stone walls and PVC pipes are all a smoke screen and a wast of our money.
There are places John where sand scraping or sand pushing on a when required basis is keeping the coastline quite secure. Up around Mackay etc. also big rock walls on some Gold Coast beaches are now tens of metres inland covered by natural sand dunes and not even obvious. But you can say the sea taketh and the sea giveth… No easy solution but hard infrastructure does protect shores of rivers, lakes and the ocean in places all over the world. I do not want to sit back and do absolutely nothing for some parts of our coastline but for other parts.. They will be best left alone for nature to do her thing.