Slip sliding away

One of the potent metaphors in Colm Tóibín's The Heather Blazing [prev] is that the the family's holiday home place is on the Irish Sea facing coast of Wexford. They've been going down there every year since the foundation of the state and every year another section of cliff has been undercut by the waves and the sea is a few inches or a few feet closer to the back door. It's like Lal and Willie Pierce's place in Ballyhealy.

Hemsby in Norfolk has been in the news at the end of November because a 30m section of a concrete road, servicing a couple of dozen wooden homes, collapsed into the sea during a storm so unspectacular that it didn't even warrant a name. This came a couple of months after a palpably sad tale of compulsory eviction and preemptive demolition of a widow-woman's home. It was one of five homes grubbed up and taken away under the same order. No compo, no counselling, no option, little notice. I suppose, it's better thus that allowing all that timber & paint & nails & copper-wire to float out to sea like a fleet of Fukushima shipping hazards. On Saturday 9th Dec, the 5 houses isolated by the collapsed road were demolished.

There is a long history of lost villages all along the East coast from Ipswich to Scarborough. From the top: Clare, Shipden, Foulness, Whimpwell, Keswick, Eccles, Waxham Parva, Ness, Newton Cross.  It's not all about global warming and sea-level rise; because geologists reckon that the East side of England is pitching down as the West side of the tectonic platelet rebounds from its load after the last ice age.

I was so taken with the story that I pitched it to Metafilter on the 7th Dec where the response was quotidian. Florida is a bigger story on disappearing beach-front property, especially if you value dollars over "heritage".

There is a utilitarian argument to be made. Nederland is throwing a lot more treasure, steel, groynes, pumps and dyke at the rising tides than Little Hans plugging a hole with his fist; although it has sometimes been een dubbeltje op zijn kant. The Brits can't or won't protect the whole of their exposed coast, so someone must decide who/what shall be saved. Even a few kilometers of rip-rap rock berm costs out at £15million - rising to £20m adjusted for grift inflation. That's about 2x the value of the 60 homes which have been lost to the waves over the last 30 years. It cost £80m to beef-up the sea wall in Dawlish [bloboprev] with, like, a proper engineered solution. But Dawlish is a town and its railway is a vital infrastructural bottleneck. It's easy for the mandarins in London to write off and Other the alternative types who live in wooden chalets among the eroding dunes of Hemsby.

Something can be done . . . if Shell Oil picks up the tab to keep its North Sea gas terminal.