Storm closes beaches after day of drama

A teenager is rescued from the surf yesterday. Picture: Sharon Smith/The West Australian

Lightning forced the closure of several beaches this morning, a day after the city recorded its hottest November day in four years.

A 17-year-old was one of 23 rescues yesterday as big crowds hit the beach to escape the heat.

But this morning the drama was in the skies, with lightning, thunder and heavy rain.

Surf Life Saving WA closed Mullaloo, Sorrento, City Beach, Cottesloe and North Cottesloe beaches this morning because of lightning.

The beaches were reopened after the storm passed.

CLICK ON THE PICTURE BELOW FOR A PICTURE GALLERY

The temperature is expected to dip back down to 25C today and 24C tomorrow and stay around the mid-20s for the rest of the week.

Lightning is believed to be responsible for delays to Perths train network this morning.

Just before 7am, Transperth said services on the Joondalup and Mandurah lines were delayed because of a technical issue.

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Storm closes beaches after day of drama

UPDATED: Fears guideline bathing water standards could scare tourists off

SEVEN Dorset beaches fail guideline standards for bathing water quality, new research from DEFRA shows.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs released a report entitled 2014 Compliance Report For Bathing Waters In England.

Although the beaches pass basic mandatory standards, it reveals a number of Dorset beaches have failed guideline standards on bathing water quality.

These are: Castle Cove beach and Sandsfoot Castle beach in Portland Harbour, Seatown beach near Bridport, Church Cliff Beach and Front Beach in Lyme Regis, and Highcliffe Castle beach and Avon Beach in Christchurch.

Cllr Ian Bruce, Weymouth and Portland Borough Councils briefholder for community facilities, said that he would be interested to know how the beaches were monitored as things like currents and flooding can have a significant bearing on results.

He said he would not like to see stricter standards putting off people from the boroughs beaches if the water was still safe to swim in.

Cllr Bruce said: Its a strange situation if people have been perfectly safe and we have not had any problems then somebody comes and says we are going to keep tightening the standard.

Clearly we do want to make sure everything is safe but we dont want to scare people off going to a particular beach.

The results also show that Lyme Regiss Church Cliff Beach has failed current mandatory standards for bathing water, which comes after a previous pass result in 2013.

Bathing waters are defined as beaches, lakes or ponds that are used by a large number of bathers and have been designated under the bathing waters directive.

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UPDATED: Fears guideline bathing water standards could scare tourists off

How human existence doesn't have to cost the Earth

Book information The Last Beach by Orrin H. Pilkey and J. Andrew G. Cooper Published by: Duke University Press Price: $19.95

Tibet's rivers feed its people, but also those of lowland Asia (Image: Maria Stenzel/NGS)

From Tibet's endangered ecosystems to the crazy cost of saving beaches to New York's green example, three books probe the price tag of development

ENVIRONMENTAL problems can seem overwhelming if met head on, so sometimes the greatest benefit just comes from a change in attitude. Three new books, with wildly different subject matter, illustrate this deceptively simple proposition.

Beaches, whether sandy or stony, are very much part of summer, but if Orrin Pilkey and Andrew Cooper's The Last Beach is right, the traditional seaside may soon be a thing of the past.

These two geomorphologists argue that the problem is that beaches are dynamic systems, and change position, size and composition as a result of wave action and tidal flow. Up-coast migrations, rapid transitions from sand to gravel, even their total disappearance, are responses to time, tide and the undertow. None of which suits people, who want holiday homes with views and reliable places to site profit-making infrastructure.

The result is a Canute-like protectionism that, instead of accepting the capricious nature of beaches, tries to nail them in place. The resulting groins, breakwaters, sea walls and artificial sand stretches tend to be expensive and can destroy the very beaches they are meant to preserve. They are at best short-term fixes and at worst, long-term cash cows for the consultancy and engineering companies attempting to solve the self-created problems, argue Pilkey and Cooper.

Their book neatly combines geography with climate studies and conservation, making it an accessible guide to the threats facing a natural resource we mostly take for granted.

The Last Beach shows that Westerners should not get smug about their future because development and house prices frequently trump environmental good sense. But Meltdown in Tibet by Michael Buckley has a far more terrifying vision: development at any ecological price. If Stephen King quit horror-writing for environmental journalism, this would be the result, leaving you uneasy, with occasional horror flashbacks. Buckley's horror, however, is real.

If you've travelled in South-East Asia, you may have come across Buckley as a veteran author of guides for the Lonely Planet series. Widely travelled, with deep knowledge of terrain and peoples, he is well-placed to document recent developments. The completion of China's Golmud-Lhasa railway about a decade ago is linked to many such changes. It has facilitated an influx of heavy equipment, mass migration of workers, and exploitation of the Tibetan plateau's mineral wealth.

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How human existence doesn't have to cost the Earth

Watch: State Attorney says no charges in June 26 beaches shooting – Video


Watch: State Attorney says no charges in June 26 beaches shooting
State Attorney Angela Corey said no charges will be filed against Kristopher Stone for the June 26 shooting death of Zachariah Tipton outside Nippers Beach Grille, citing justifiable homicide...

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UPDATE: Fears new bathing water standards could scare tourists off

Castle Cove beach, which is one of seven Dorset beaches DEFRA say would fail new water quality standards

BASIC: Castle Cove Beach in Portland Harbour

First published in News by Liz Jackson

SEVEN Dorset beaches would fail basic bathing water quality standards under new standards being implemented in 2015, new research from DEFRA shows. The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs released a report entitled 2014 Compliance Report For Bathing Waters In England, which reveals a number of Dorset beaches would fail the new stricter standards on bath-ing water quality. These are: Castle Cove beach and Sandsfoot Castle beach in Portland Harbour, Seatown beach near Bridport, Church Cliff Beach and Front Beach in Lyme Regis, and Highcliffe Castle beach and Avon Beach in Christchurch. Cllr Ian Bruce, Weymouth and Portland Borough Councils briefholder for community facilities, said that he would be interested to know how the beaches were monitored as things like currents and flooding can have a significant bearing on results. He said he would not like to see stricter standards putting off people from the boroughs beaches if the water was still safe to swim in. Cllr Bruce said: Its a strange situation if people have been perfectly safe and we have not had any problems then somebody comes and says we are going to keep tightening the standard. Clearly we do want to make sure everything is safe but we dont want to scare people off going to a particular beach. The results also show that Lyme Regiss Church Cliff Beach has failed current mandatory standards for bathing water, which comes after a previous pass result in 2013. Bathing waters are defined as beaches, lakes or ponds that are used by a large number of bathers and have been designated under the bathing waters directive. From 2015 a revised bathing waters directive will be issued, using stricter standards. These are effectively the same standards DEFRA has used to decide if the beaches would fail, which they have called guideline compliance for the transition period between the old directive and the new directive. The report says 84.5 per cent of South West beaches would pass the new standards, putting the seven Dorset beaches in the regions bottom 15.5 percent. It would also put them in the bottom fifth (19.3 percent) of beaches across England. In addition, DEFRA has said on its website that it is surveying the number of users of Church Cliff Beach in Lyme Regis. The beach is one of 12 across the country that will be surveyed, and if the number of bathers using the beach is considered to be low, DEFRA will consult whether to remove the beach altogether from their list of bathing waters. The full report can be viewed at: http://bit.ly/1EpdjNC.

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UPDATE: Fears new bathing water standards could scare tourists off

Lifeguards in Goa to go on strike

The safety of Goas tourist beaches could be temporarily jeopardised for 48 hours from November 21.

This is following a strike notice given by the Goa Trade & Commercial Workers Union (AITUC), representing lifeguards and workers in other categories, to Drishti Lifesaving Pvt. Ltd., contractual agency manning the beaches, against its hire and fire approach of the management.

The Department of Tourism, government of Goa, through a contractual agency, mans Goas beaches for safety. Christopher Fonseca, general secretary, AITUC, Goa, on Saturday demanded that 11 workmen/lifeguards whose services were allegedly illegally terminated be reinstated with full back wages and continuity in service with immediate effect. The management has repeatedly denied the allegations, he said.

He also demanded that the Department of Tourism and Drishti Live-saving Pvt. Ltd. stop harassing and victimising the workmen/lifeguards. The trade union has also raised issues, including demands pertaining to payment of salaries without delay, resolving all the cases pending before the State Labour Commissioner and payment of higher salaries to lifeguards with commensurate seniority weightage for every year of service, Mr. Fonseca said.

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Lifeguards in Goa to go on strike

Miss Earth bets shocked at PH traffic

By ROBERT R. REQUINTINA

Manila, Philippines Churches and beaches are on the wish list of must-see places in the Philippines for some candidates in the 2014 Miss Earth beauty pageant.

Some of them have arrived early for the environment-driven beauty contest such as Austria, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Fiji, Myanmar, Samoa, South Africa, Switzerland, Tonga, United States, and Zambia.

But some of the candidates were shocked at the traffic in Metro Manila.

Traffic is so heavy. But the people are so nice and smiling, said Miss USA Andrea Neu, 23, of Colorado.

Miss Zambia Cartier Zagorski of Lusaka also noticed the citys heavy traffic.

The people here are simply amazing! Oh my God! The traffic! said Zagorsk during a welcome dinner tendered by Yoshinoya Restaurant in Glorietta, Makati City Friday night.

Pageant organizers said the welcome dinner is the first public appearance for the candidates of Miss Earth contest.

It was also the third time that the Japanese fastfood chain gave a welcome treat to early arrivals of the beauty contest, said Yoshinoya Century Pacific Inc. President Timothy Yang.

At the mall, heads turned as customers and shoppers with tablets and cellphones with cameras stopped and posed for souvenir photos with the girls.

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Miss Earth bets shocked at PH traffic

The end of beaches? Why the worlds shorelines are in serious trouble

We can have our beachfront properties our Miami high-rises, our Hamptons mansions, our Jersey boardwalks or we can have our beaches. But as geologist and Duke University emeritus professor Orrin Pilkey has been arguing for decades now, we cant have both.

As the oceans warm and sea levels rise, coastal living is becoming an increasingly risky proposition. Any climate scientist would tell you not to invest in a beach house, and yet large-scale migration inland is something weve yet to see. The beaches themselves can withstand extreme weather, of course. But its our attempts to hold them in place,through techno-fixes like seawalls and beach replenishment, that ironically enough will end up destroying them. Sooner or later, Pilkey argues, were going to be forced to retreat. The question is whether therell be any beach left by then.

The Last Beach, which Pilkey co-wrote with J. Andrew G. Cooper, a professor of coastal studies at the University of Ulster, is but his latest attempt to drive home just how wrong-headed our push to build on and preserve shorelines is. Its been an uphill battle; for Pilkey, what counts as progress was that people acknowledged his plea not to rebuild after Superstorm Sandy instead of just attacking him for suggesting it even if they didnt really end up following his advice.

Bring pollution, oil spills and the destructive business of sand mining into the picture, and its not so extreme, Pilkey told Salon, to imagine a future where beaches as we know them as places to live and even as places to visit will no longer exist.

We dont typically think of beaches as something that can go extinct, but it seems like thats basically what youre arguing here.

Thats exactly what we argue: that beaches in developed areas will not be there, that they will be replaced by seawalls large and small. There will be beaches left in remote places and on national seashores and things like that, perhaps although theyll be suffering too, because theyll be eroding and retreating back separately from the developed areas, which will be standing still for a while.

By the time we really begin to see whats happening, like we are right now in Florida, well be worrying about Manhattan and Queens and Boston and Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Miami, Charleston, all those cities. We fully expect that the great expense required to hold back the shoreline which is a losing proposition in any event will be overwhelming for them.

It seems to us to be pretty obvious and I think most geologists would agree with this that in a 50- to 100-year timeframe were in trouble. The best example of that, the proof in the pudding, is Florida, where they have hundreds of miles of highrise-lined shoreline. What can they do? You could move the buildings back, but thats very costly and theres no place to move them to. So what we see right now, especially with the current governor of Florida, is the building of seawalls right and left. All you have to do is declare an emergency and you can build a seawall.

In the book, you also discuss how beaches have become dangerous places. So would you say theres also a loss of beaches, not physically, but as we are able to enjoy them?

Yeah, that was the point of that. We, by the way, were really shocked the one chapter that was really out of our range was pollution, and we were rather shocked at the numbers. We saw repeated statements about how to use a beach, if youre going to go to a beach what should you do and how should you use it, in the technical literature, but it hasnt been getting out to the public. Maybe thats a little bit of irresponsibility on the part of some of the biochemists in not getting that out to the public. On the other hand, I know what would happen. They would get heavily criticized, probably, as being alarmists.

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The end of beaches? Why the worlds shorelines are in serious trouble

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Seven Dorset beaches would fail new water quality standards

SEVEN Dorset beaches would fail basic bathing water quality standards being implemented in 2015, new research from DEFRA shows.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs released a report yesterday entitled 2014 compliance report for bathing waters in England, which reveals a number of Dorset beaches would fail the new stricter standards on bathing water quality.

These are: Castle Cove beach and Sandsfoot Castle beach in Portland Harbour, Seatown beach near Bridport, Church Cliff Beach and Front Beach in Lyme Regis, and Highcliffe Castle beach and Avon Beach in Christchurch.

The results also show that Lyme Regis Church Cliff Beach has failed current mandatory standards for bathing water, which comes after a previous pass result in 2013.

Bathing waters are defined as beaches, lakes or ponds that are used by a large number of bathers and have been designated under the bathing waters directive.

From 2015 a revised bathing waters directive will be issued, using stricter standards to determine bathing water quality.

These are effectively the same standards DEFRA has used to decide if the beaches would fail, which they have called guideline compliance for the transition period between the old directive and the new directive.

According to the report, 84.5 percent of South West beaches would pass the new testing standards, putting the seven Dorset beaches in the bottom 15.5 percent in the region.

It would also put them in the bottom fifth (19.3 percent) of beaches across England.

In addition, DEFRA have said on their website that they are surveying the number of users of Church Cliff Beach in Lyme Regis.

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Seven Dorset beaches would fail new water quality standards

Chappy Beaches Closed to Vehicles After Storm

An early November storm left behind severe erosion on Chappaquiddick beaches, which have been closed to over-sand vehicle traffic.

We had high winds sustained for 48 hours or more, so Im not surprised that the north shore of Chappy and the rest of the Island really took a beating, Trustees of Reservations Vineyard Superintendent Chris Kennedy told the Gazette.

Mr. Kennedy said the storm on Nov. 1 and Nov. 2 caused significant erosion on east and north facing beaches on Chappaquiddick. Rangers have been out on the beaches every day to monitor the situation, he said, and he thought that a few days of wind blowing out of the southwest should bring enough sand to reopen the beaches. For now, they are closed to over-sand vehicle traffic.

Were hoping that this is just very temporary, he said. We are looking at it every single day. He said spots at Leland Beach are getting close to opening, and he thought the beaches could begin to open in the next few days.

All interior trails are still open, he said.

At Wasque, no upland was lost but the storm did take out some sections of the beach that had accreted over the summer, Mr. Kennedy said, adding that the breach between Norton Point and Wasque is still fairly large.

Meanwhile, the storm also caused damage to the North Neck of Chappaquiddick, where staircases leading down to the beach were seen mangled and in disrepair this week.

For updates about Chappaquiddick beach closures from the Trustees, check the Trustees Facebook page or call the beach information line at 508-627-8390.

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Chappy Beaches Closed to Vehicles After Storm