Spate of slips cuts off coast

Access to the North Shore’s popular cliff-bound beaches has for months been crumbling into the sea, with key public stairways collapsing in land slips.

Three beach staircases down steep embankments, and two clifftop walkways, have been cordoned off as unsafe, leaving beaches in Castor Bay, Beach Haven, Narrow Neck, and Browns Bay increasingly isolated.

In the case of Castor Bay Beach, a long wooden staircase completely destroyed in April’s ex-cyclone Debbie has added a 20-minute walk in either direction over rocks to the once busy beach.

Hibiscus and Bays Local Board chair Julia Parfitt oversees three of these cliff-top slips in her board area, and says she is hopeful funding to repair them can be allocated in Auckland Council’s 2017/18 renewals budget.

‘‘We can never judge when a storm event is going to happen and there should be some emergency response money, but I think, because we’ve had so many storms within a year, money will be fairly stretched. It’s hard, you know, the clay soil and such a wide area of the East Coast was hit. We’ve had some minor track repair, but overall our track condition is in desperate need of an upgrade anyway,’’ Parfitt says.

Auckland Council head of stakeholder land advisory Kim O’Neill says, after closing many beach access sites, the council was assessing the extent of the damage but ‘‘haven’t confirmed the best solution to fix the damage so we can’t confirm repair costs.’’

The most recent North Shore land slip cutting off beach access occurred in Beach Haven five weeks ago, on a stairway leading from Neptune Rd to Charcoal Bay.

The slip drew criticism from trumpeter Edwina Thorne whose property adjoins the coastal pathway. Thorne engaged in a successful small claims legal battle with the council in 2012, obtaining partial compensation to structurally reinforce the cliff face her own property overlooks costing $45,000. A public drain running through her garden was gradually causing the land to sink.

‘‘What they didn’t do is stabilise, like I did, the land to the left of me, which was also inundated with water,’’ Thorne says.

‘‘I knew it was going to slip, and they knew. That was something they could have avoided. Okay it might have cost them $40,000, but what’s a walkway going to cost to put back?’’

Coastal access stairways across the North Shore, cordoned off due to land slip damage, clockwise from top left: Beach Haven, Castor Bay, Narrow Neck and Browns Bay.