Owners of coastal properties at risk of erosion are hopeful the state government will permit the installation of rock walls on public beaches following a court judgement allowing the use of sea walls to save waterfront homes.
The Land and Environment Court ruled in favour of beachfront homeowners at The Entrance North who had been seeking to build a seawall to protect their properties from coastal erosion.
The court heard emergency protection works had offered little protection.
Central Coast Council opposed the installation of a seawall, arguing the interests of landowners did not outweigh the public interest in maintaining the scenic qualities of the coast.
The ruling set a precedent for coastal properties throughout NSW that are under threat of being swept into the sea.
Property owners at Wamberal are now seeking a whole-of-beach solution involving the installation of carefully designed and placed sandstone rock revetment that is sensitive to coastal processes along the beach.
The solution is similar to one used to protect homes at Collaroy Beach on Sydney's northern beaches.
The revetment is covered with sand and vegetation and is only visible during heavy swells.
"The owners will pay for their individual section," Wamberal Protection Association president Chris Rogers said.
"If they allow us to use some of the public beach, we will implement a buried sandstone rock revetment. If there's a storm it will get exposed, but will be sandstone," he said.
Mr Rogers said residents wanted to work with the council and state government to introduce a sustainable solution rather than taking individual court action.
"At Wamberal beach there's a real opportunity where you have a long stretch of beach with 100 different landowners that have already spent a couple of million dollars trying to get a solution, but are still willing to sit down with the government to implement a solution," he said.
"If they don't do anything, there'll be five or six groups of owners that will head off to the Land and Environment Court and win.
"Then you will have ad hoc protection all along the beach."
Central Coast Council submitted a request to the NSW Reconstruction Authority (RA) for the proposed coastal protection works at Wamberal in July.
A government spokeswoman said it supported a coordinated, long-term approach to coastal protection.
"Any proposal for coastal protection works needs to be considered on its merits and in accordance with the relevant planning, environmental and coastal management requirements, and importantly, community consultation," she said.
"The NSW Government's focus is on supporting a coordinated approach that provides an appropriate solution for Wamberal Beach and the broader community."
Former NSW planning minister Rob Stokes believes sea walls should be seen as a pragmatic response to a "wicked problem", which was the result of poor planning choices made decades ago.
"These are places where development should not have been allowed, and the land should not have been subdivided and sold," he said.
"We're now trying to retrofit and try to improve an inherently bad situation."
While sea walls could prevent the loss of private property, they should not be seen as a permanent fix to the challenges of rising sea levels, he said.
"I don't think anyone thinks the seawall at Collaroy and Narrabeen will be effective forever, but it will be effective for the foreseeable future as the best engineering solution that they could come up with," he said.
"What we shouldn't do is then authorise more intensive development in areas like this because that just makes a bad situation worse.
"But we do have to deal with the problem in front of us.
"That's why when I was a minister we set up the Coastal Management Act as a way to deal embayment by embayment with these issues."
