PFCG work applauded and information shared at meeting
The cold and wet early morning starts of our beach monitoring team delivers information that is both useful and highly valued by the local council and coastal engineers.
At a meeting held on 14 December in Port Fairy, DELWP Coastal Engineer, Darren James, spoke highly of our work in beach monitoring and referred to us as one of the best examples in the state.
The meeting was a way to to discuss methodologies and swap information and included David Bills-Thompson, PFCG Technical Officer, Darren James, Principal Coastal Engineer, DELWP and Dr. Werner Hennecke Phd, MSc. Dr Hennecke is a consultant with Cardno and is a GIS Specialist/Senior Coastal Geomorphologist Water & Environment.
At the meeting David explained what we do with Beach Monitoring in Port Fairy and outlined the results and the availability of data in the Posts Spreadsheet which is to be circulated to Darren and Werner.
Darren James, committed to providing additional information such as:
historic coastal images
LIDAR images
bathometric surveys of PF Bay.
Darren and Werner shared a number of significant documents with our group which are available including articles on:
Bengello Beach near Moruya, NSW which has been studied for 40 years and is similar in geography to Port Fairy Bay,
dealing with the importance of Beach Monitoring or, as they refer to it, Data Collection.
The point was made that to accurately predict a one in a hundred year 'weather event' you need to have three hundred years worth of accurate data.
Darren also discussed the perils of beach enrichment from sand dredging in the bay and concluded that it was not feasible. The difficulties arise because of dredge limitations on how deep they can dredge. If you take sand from a trench in relatively shallow water, spurious waves can be set up and cause more damage. A very large dredge is required to work in water at depths that would prevent spurious waves from forming and would have a prohibitive cost. Sand enrichment is at best a temporary fix and would need repeating.
For more information on websites and other sources on monitoring of coastal environments see: http://www.coastalmonitoring.info.
For more infomation on the PFCG Beach Monitoring Data, contact us.
