Shifting sands eat up Oyster Bay
Residents say authorities won’t let them save their properties
FIRST the doormat disappeared, then the garden wall.
Then, when the right side of their retirement house vanished beneath a sand dune, Gill and Konrad Brandstetter bought a front-end loader.
It was too little, too late. The street in front of their house disappeared, along with the electricity meter, swallowed by a moving mountain of sand. A neighbour’s kitchen ceiling collapsed — too much sand had blown in through the roof tiles.
And the Eastern Cape provincial government has banned residents of Oyster Bay from interfering with its sand dunes.
The small holiday town, built on a shifting 30km dune belt, is fighting a losing battle against nature as beachfront houses are being buried. Residents claim their pleas for help are ignored.
Four years ago, the town lost four houses after the government refused to allow residents to bulldoze away a sand dune blocking the local river. The houses collapsed into the river after it burst its banks.
Now a second dune has started swallowing houses east of the river mouth, raising an outcry and sparking legal squabbles.
Residents have spent almost R300 000 on a dune management plan and environmental impact assessment and say the government has abandoned them.
“The sand will definitely swallow my house if we don’t keep moving it — it is very sad to think about that happening,” said Gill, who can now only enter her home via a neighbouring property. “Our neigh- bour has threatened to fence his plot off because we are accessing our house over his land, which he is trying to sell.”
She said they had spent more than R250 000 to keep the sand at bay. But the dune was relentless: “As we open the door to our house, after shovelling away the sand at the back door before entering the house, we have to clean all counter tops, shake out covers over all furniture . . . And sweep floors.”
Desperate, the Brandstetters bought a three-ton loader to fight the sand, but were stopped in December by provincial environmental affairs authorities. “They said they’d move the sand themselves in January,” Gill said. “We are still waiting.”
A private company offered to move the sand free of charge to use at a nearby wind farm, but was prevented due to red tape, the Sunday Times has learnt.
Resident Keith Mutch said he had tried to keep the sand out by building sand breaks. “Power meters and water meters to homes have been covered in over 2m of sand, so the local municipality just ran pipes and cables to meters over the sand to the houses so they could still charge utility fees,” he said.
The province’s environmental affairs spokesman, Sixolile Makaula, confirmed that the department had left the dunes untouched but said it was hoping to solve the problem.
“This is poor planning inher- ited,” he said. “The coastal town of Oyster Bay is in the path of the migrating dune field. Sand dunes migrate and natural processes can to a degree be controlled, but never stopped.”
Kouga municipality spokeswoman Laura-Leigh Randall said the town had done a basic assessment to obtain permission to remove the sand and submitted it to the Department of Environmental Affairs in November for approval.
“We expect to receive a response from them within the next few weeks.”