Save Our Selsey - Campaign for Coastal Defence

This storm breached the flood defence at Medmerry, causing the worst coastal flooding in the area for nearly 40 years, and some Ł5m worth of damage. The Environment Agency (EA) is trying to say this was inevitable. But was it?

The day after the storm, the EA – which is meant to maintain the frontage - issued a statement that “it is of little surprise that a storm of this size…caused this flooding” - not very helpful to people who had lost their homes, caravans or possessions!

What the EA didn’t tell you is that:

The crest of the shingle ridge has a designed width of 15m, to be at all effective as a defence, yet when the storm hit it was only 5m wide.
SOS warned the EA that they were courting disaster due to the lack of the necessary replenishment of the flood defence. Instead the EA continued to reprofile the inadequate, depleted shingle.
The EA was warned 48hrs before the storm that it urgently needed to do more before the storm hit. It did nothing, despite having an adequate budget to import shingle to get the ridge back to its design standard.

Nor did the EA mention another problem. Once the water got over the weakened ridge, it didn’t immediately drain off the land through the drainage ditches (rifes) behind the beach:

The EA had cut the reeds in the rifes, but not removed them. When the rifes flooded, the cut reeds blocked the sluice gates and pumps that should evacuate the water, so the floodwater just got deeper and deeper.

So, we aren’t surprised “that a storm of this size…caused this flooding”, either!

The defences were only a third of their designed width, and the drainage ditches were dysfunctional

What the EA didn’t say was that an internal EA report written in 2004 shows (obtained by SOS through the Freedom of Information Act):

only 750m of the 3.8km beach was particularly vulnerable
the decision was made to do no permanent repairs, or any maintenance that would make it difficult to flood the area (by a realignment scheme)
the budget for maintenance was Ł300k pa, but only Ł100k was being used – the rest was being sent back
The EA also said there was no economic or technical justification for continuing the replenishment of shingle

Will the EA take responsibility for these omissions, and learn from them? Not likely – it quickly issued a statement that the defences were up to standard and that “all of our research suggests that a realignment of the defences inland… is the right thing to do”.
It looks to us as if a decision was already made, that the shoreline policy was going to be realignment, and the EA weren’t going to take the existing policy (“Hold the Line”) very seriously. In 2007, for example, the EA started pulling out groynes and breastworks “for health and safety reasons”, rather than repairing them.

This calls into question the validity of the public “consultation” carried out in 2007, when the EA claimed it wanted to know people’s views on how to manage the coastline, and would “consider” them.

The EA officials we’ve met who are involved in this exercise are acting in good faith. However, we believe that higher up in the Agency, and at DEFRA, there is a prejudice towards managed realignment and a strong urge to discredit the policy of “hold the line”.

We suspect the reason for this has little to do with the cost of “holding the line” along the 750m of the beach that are vulnerable. Our research has shown:

In 2003 an obscure report identified Medmerry as the best place in the Solent to create salt marshes, with potential to flood 943Ha
An EC rule obliges the EA to create 200Ha of new salt marshes every year, and it has fallen behind on its targets
If Medmerry flooded, the EA would get lots of saltmarsh, and not have to pay any compensation to the people flooded in order to make it.

So, we strongly suspect that the hidden agenda is one of creating saltmarsh habitat, and that this has pushed the EA inextricably towards managed realignment at Medmerry, despite the fact that “hold the line” is a realistic, sustainable option for the frontage, and the one preferred by the community.

The poor state of the defences on March 10th is symptomatic of the desire of the EA to realign the beach to create saltmarsh. If the EA supported the “hold the line” policy wholeheartedly, it had the budget, the expertise and the manpower not just to ensure the defence was up to specification, but to increase the specification to the point that proved that “holding the line” was sustainable for many years to come.

e-mail: info@saveourselsey.org