Saving the steps

Like many others I am very pleased with the news that the New Plymouth District Council will be (looking again) at the Back Beach steps.

Sadly, considering the stated array of bureaucratic hurdles this restoration project apparently has to surmount I doubt that the steps will be fixed this summer.

While this will inconvenience a lot of beach users the track will also suffer greatly from foot traffic-induced erosion.

When I visited the site with the Daily News reporter there was ample evidence that the barrier half way down had not stopped people going all the way to the beach.

We could see fresh footprints as well as clear evidence of early erosion where the steps had been removed. Erosion was worse on the 10 metre sand slide above the beach.

About a week later I went down with Kelvin Harvey to do some measurements and was quite shocked to find how much the now unprotected lower half of the track had further deteriorated from ongoing use and water scouring.

The precious stone chips that once filled the steps are now being kicked off the track. The whole track is situated on a steep slope of highly erodible sandy soil and without protection will quickly turn into a sorry mess.

Urgent preventative action is needed to stop this unprotected part of the track from becoming a gulch. Surely the council does not require a new resource consent, iwi consultation or an engineering report to put the same steps back that were removed since it did not require any of that to rip them out.

Herb Spannagl, New Plymouth