In Victoria's Moyne Shire — a municipality with just 16,000 people and a100 kilometre coastline — engineer Ebony Perrin focuses on how to achieve effective and affordable solutions to the flooding and erosion caused by storm surges.
She has no doubt that the problems are due to climate change and sea level rise and that continuing action — and significant funding — will be needed to protect the public infrastructure and natural environment that have helped Port Fairy and other coastal villages become cherished visitor destinations.
The council has already responded to the current erosion threatening houses and infrastructure among sand dunes through installation of a rock wall that dissipates wave energy at East Beach in Port Fairy and Perrin is working closely with local environmentalists and her council colleagues on more initiatives.
She is armed with the Port Fairy Local Coastal Hazard Assessment Report undertaken by the University of New South Wales in 2013 and knowledge — and promises of help — gained during a study tour last year. A scholarship funded by the Municipal Engineering Foundation Victoria and the City of Boroondara took her to the American Public Works Congress in Toronto, Canada, and to Miami, San Francisco, New York and London to discusses how responses to coastal hazards in the northern hemisphere are applicable to Victoria's south west coast. In Miami she saw how normal sea levels are now above road levels.
"It can be a lovely, sunny day and there will be flooding around stormwater drains...anyone who doesn't believe in sea level rise should go there — the town is literally having to be elevated. Sea walls have been built and roads and some houses are being raised above predicted 50 year sea levels." Perrin studied civil engineering at the University of Melbourne before jobs in consultancy took her into the water and pipeline industries in Victoria and England, where she met her future husband. The family had settled in Warrnambool when: "this amazing, amazing job came up with Moyne Shire." The environment services team leader was a new position based not with the council's own engineering team but beside it in a group dedicated to environmental improvement. Top concern was addressing dune erosion where two tips, both closed for decades, had become exposed with glass and other rubbish spilling on to a beach.
Perrin says the council decision makers who placed the tips "would never have anticipated the rate of erosion of the dunes that has occurred...Climate change and sea level rise has increased the intensity of storms. We had a major storm last June with rocks and water across roads, seaweed on the door handles of houses but we estimate that the rock structure we had put in saved four metres of that landfill area." While politicians in Canberra may still be arguing about the likely impact of climate change, Port Fairy residents have little doubt. Perrin says development of a climate adaptation plan is under way and community input has been huge.
"Councils need a whole of organisation approach to climate change. It affects every department of a municipal organisation. We need to green our cities to keep them cooler and design and maintain drains to deal with future storms."
