AFTER years of dry winters, we’re on track to record above average rainfall for 2018.
It’s good news for our dams and our farmers but it’s wreaking havoc on WA’s coastline, washing away sand dunes and putting our beaches at risk.
Seashore Engineering director Matt Eliot said the storms had taken their toll.
“We’ve had a couple of fairly early, fairly heavy storms that’ve primed a lot of the beaches, sort of eroded some of them,” he said.
Every winter the beach erodes and is built back up over summer.
But we’ve had a whole winters’ worth of erosion already, leaving our beaches incredibly vulnerable.
Mr Eliot said further heavy weather could be disastrous.
“If we get another few large storms we’re likely to see some of the infrastructure falling into the ocean,” he said.
In Floreat, part of a carpark was shaved off by erosion in the ‘80s.
Mr Eliot says one more storms this season could see it in danger again.
“The carpark is close enough that if we had probably two or three more metres of erosion we’d start to see some further loss of carpark, so it’s pretty close,” he said.
But locals refuse to let it happen without a fight.
Each winter Coastcare groups brave the cold with a deep rooted determination to save our beaches from erosion.
“They do a lot to stop the dunes from collapsing further, they do a lot to stop when we have sand drift coming from the beach up,” Mr Eliot said.
The dunes are the number one priority.
Every year Cambridge Coastcare plants hundreds of native seedlings along local beaches.
Their goal is to keep the dunes as strong and natural as possible, with the root systems of native species acting as a buffer to keep the dunes in place.
While winter storms do their share of damage, people threaten the fragile ecosystem year-round.
“People don’t stick to the paths and once they go off the paths and start climbing through the sand dunes it breaks the cover up, and then the wind gets it and it blows it out,” Cambridge Coastcare chairman Ivo Davies said.
Seeing if this winter will bring more weather damage - that’s now a waiting game.
In the meantime, the experts say everyone can help - by simply staying on the path.
“Pay attention to the signage that says please keep off,” Mr Eliot said.