Stepping out

The Back Beach steps had a land slip ages ago and most beach goers either used them or were waiting for the council to repair them.

We are shocked that half of them have been destroyed. This is absolute vandalism.

In talking to a council employee, he said they had an engineer look at it and the cost was too high (especially for what an engineer would want). Engineers for steps? How far does it go?

One wonders what test he did. If they were dangerous, why did they leave them there for so long? Many times we tested them as one would see kids going to use them.

Any handyman-type person could see that disposing of the precarious-looking landing (that was not needed anyway) and joining the two stable landings that were each on the stable ground with diagonal steps could have lasted for many years.

But no, they decided to create a landing half way up and destroy half the steps. Destroying them, the council employee said, was to stop people going down and stop further sand erosion. Any commonsense person can see it will not stop anyone going down that way and will create more erosion.

Many beach walkers would do the round trip along the beach using the steps. Obviously no councillors do this, but many of your valued tourists and locals did and were expecting repaired steps. Why could not the public be consulted before this action? I am an ex-builder and other handymen-type blokes could see there was an easy way to repair these steps. We thought they must be going to reroute them or something. We couldn’t imagine that they would destroy them with no other steps to replace them. We could have easily repaired them. Their excuse of extra heavy seas with global warming is pathetic.

Coastal erosion comes and goes. These steps could have lasted another 10 years or more. And a little repair is all that was needed.

Kevin A Harvey, New Plymouth