What we learned: Tuesday, 1 July
With that, we will wrap the blog for the evening. Stay safe out there. If you’re in New South Wales, you can keep up to all the latest weather developments with the NSW SES for live warnings, the Bureau of Meteorology and Live Traffic for road closures.
Until tomorrow, here were today’s biggest developments:
Parts of the Central Coast have been urged to evacuate due to dangerous waves causing coastal erosion as wild weather continues to hit New South Wales. Rainfall may reach up to 250mm in the coming hours, with the worst still to come.
Ausgrid, which services Sydney, the Central Coast and the Hunter, has confirmed about 30, 000 customers are without power amid today’s severe weather. Emergency services were responding to more than 1,000 jobs on Tuesday evening, including fallen trees and powerlines.
Some ferries in Sydney and regional trains have been suspended amid the storms, while more than a dozen roads have been closed due to flooding across the state.
And in Victoria, a childcare worker has been charged with more than 70 offences after alleging sexually abusing eight children in his care.
Updated
Central Coast community divided over sea wall amid extreme weather
The severe weather and subsequent evacuation orders for parts of the Central Coast have reignited fierce debate over whether a sea wall should be built on Wamberal beach to protect beachfront properties from erosion.
Earlier this evening, the NSW SES told people in properties along Hutton Road at the north entrance of the Central Coast and at Wamberal on parts of Ocean View Drive, which backs on to Wamberal beach, and Pacific Street to evacuate.
The community of Wamberal Beach, 90km north of Sydney, has been struggling with coastal erosion for years, with division over whether or not the council should install a sea wall.
Mark Lamont, from the Save Our Sand Wamberal group, which is opposed to a sea wall, is advocating for “sand nourishment” as an alternative, that is for the beach to be replenished with sand from nearby locations.
The SOS is not an extremist, greenie group. We’re a pretty broad church. We are open to experts giving advice on a strategy that’s led by an understanding of and working with beach processes.
Lamont, whose wife is a Central Coast councillor who is also opposed to the wall, said the houses on the beach “probably shouldn’t be there” at all.
But, he said “given what we’ve got”, an alternative would be to build an “entirely buried, flexible, sloping revetment”, which he argued would cause less damage or additional erosion than a wall.
Of the revetment idea, Lamont said:
In a one-in-100 year event it could provide that extra support. But that only works if you have the sand nourishment.
Everyone is very concerned about the impact the storms are having here on the coast.
Updated
