Surge leaves posh village exposed to stormy seas
● For years, homeowners in St Francis enjoyed the sight of waves smashing onto the beach. They didn’t expect them to smash right through the beach, as they did a week ago.
Now the Eastern Cape town is scrambling to plug a gap in a strip of dunes that separate multimillion-rand homes from the Indian Ocean ahead of a series of powerful cold fronts.
In a week of violent wind, rain and flooding across much of SA, Kouga municipality was hard at work with bulldozers reinforcing a thin spit of sand, which is all that remains of a line of thick coastal dunes.
With the dunes gone due to years of housing development, houses alongside the town’s canals will be more exposed to storm surges, which scientists predict will become more commonplace.
One of the biggest winter storms in years made landfall in the Cape on Friday, but by Saturday the spit had not been breached again. Another storm is expected to arrive tomorrow.
“The spit has been under pressure for a while now,” the St Francis Property Owners said in a statement this week. “The erosion in St Francis Bay has been estimated to be about a metre a year for the last 40 years.”
Efforts to protect the eroding coastline have caused a rift in the town, notably around a long-term plan involving groyne “walls” along the beach. The municipality is in favour of the plan but the provincial government is taking a cautious approach and has insisted on a detailed environmental impact assessment (EIA).
Residents have exchanged legal threats about the establishment of a special rates area to raise funds for the long-term rehabilitation plan, which includes upgrades of roads and crime surveillance infrastructure.
Supporters of the long-term plan believe the emergency intervention on the spit is not a lasting solution and does not address other problems, such as the silting up of the river mouth.
“We will submit an EIA later this year,” said property owners chair Wayne Furphy. “Once we have the EIA we have enough funds to start the first phase,” which would include dumping a million cubic metres of sand on the main beach.
Furphy and other homeowners say the plan is the only way to protect the value of their properties — which they claim have declined by 60% in the past decade — and the town’s brand as an investment destination.
Opponents of the plan say it is being driven by more affluent residents who can afford to pay the hefty special levy for the groyne intervention. They say there are more pressing needs than protecting the canal homes.
“The canal homeowners are a very wealthy bunch of people, semi-retired, with plenty of money, but there are a lot of retired folk not interested in paying an extra levy,” said one resident, who wished to remain anonymous.
Eastern Cape department of economic development, environmental affairs & tourism official Dayalan Govender this week confirmed that authorisation had been given for the emergency work. He said the longerterm plan had not yet been approved.
The department was informed by a provincial climate change strategy when considering environmental authorisations, Govender said.