Giant waves have crashed onto Stockton Beach in Newcastle for the second time in weeks, breaching already eroded sand dunes and leaving locals worried about what the winter months will bring.
Driven by a low pressure system, the latest event on Saturday saw waves up to six metres high push water through a popular council caravan park and send sand into the streets.
It followed a different east coast low during March that claimed trees and shrubs from the front of the park and stripped sections of Mitchell Street.
"It's absolutely the worst anyone has seen it," local Ron Boyd said.
"We've lost pretty much the front of the caravan park, we've lost about a third of Dalby Oval, and water is running across the street down into the suburb in front of people's houses and we haven't seen anything like that."
He said the suburb — nestled on the northern side of the city's industrial harbour — was disappearing before his eyes as waves and tides stripped the beach and slowly swallowed the land.
Mr Boyd was also a coastal geologist and said the typical east coast low season was yet to begin.
"May and June, that's when we typically see east coast lows," he said.
No time to recover
Hannah Power, Associate Professor of Coastal and Marine Science at the University of Newcastle, believed the city could expect more extreme east coast lows, even if modelling did not necessarily show there would be more of them.
She said the deep lows were being formed by warm water sitting off the coast, which fuelled the atmosphere.
"We've not just had one single event, we've had multiple events happen in close succession, and so the beaches haven't had time to recover in that intervening period," Ms Power said.
She said Stockton's problem was that the sand no longer self-replenished.
Numerous studies have shown that the northern breakwall to Newcastle Harbour was acting as a barrier to sand replenishment.
"At Stockton it's going to be challenging — sand won't naturally return on the whole how it was 10 or 20 years ago."
Nervous about winter
The Stockton Beach Taskforce was established by the NSW government in 2020 to find a long term solution to the suburb's erosion.
It was investigating several ideas to fix Stockton's woes, including dredging an offshore sand deposit and dropping it just off Stockton Beach.
In the meantime, Mr Boyd and the Stockton community were keeping a nervous eye on the winter months ahead.
He said the erosion crisis was at a critical stage and action, rather than talk, was needed now.
"There's a huge sense of frustration," Mr Boyd said.
"You only have to look at the social media pages around Stockton to realise the frustration and the apathy with the fact that, 'Oh yeah, another storm, nothing's going to happen'."
