A lifeguard tower was left teetering on a cliff edge and had to be relocated, after constant huge swells battered the shoreline
Coastal geomorphologist and Professor at the University of Melbourne, David Kennedy said the scenes at Cronulla were “uncharacteristic but not unprecedented” and said the scale of the erosion seen was likely due to the interference of infrastructure in the natural beach process.
“Beaches are counterintuitive. They’re loose piles of sand. But because they are movable obstructions to the water they are great at sort of laying there and acting as a buffer. They are the shock absorbers of the coast,” he said.“What we’ve done is we’ve removed some of the shocks on the coast, by putting in the seawall, and by doing this we have effectively reduced the beaches resilience to change.
Kennedy said the heavy sea walls on either side of North Cronulla beach likely contributed to the increased erosion of the shore. The sea walls were constructed in 1974 after a similar period of stormy weather eroded the beachfront and threatened the properties and infrastructure that line it.
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