RICHARD WRINCH, SUFFOLK
⁕ Suffolk farmer Richard Wrinch has had to part with £27,000 in the past three years for repairs to his one-and-a-half-mile stretch of sea wall.
“We had been told by the Environment Agency before the tidal surge of December 2013 that it had withdrawn maintenance of our wall and repairs were up to us,” said Mr Wrinch.
“The wall didn’t disappear but it was overtopped and after five weeks of waiting for the water to vanish we realised it had taken 90% of the clay shoring it up.”
It cost the Wrinch family £17,000 to hire experts and buy the heavy plant to reclaim the clay following the tidal surge. In the autumn of 2015 they had to make another repair to a 40m stretch of wall at a cost of £10,000.
If they had done nothing, the sea would eventually have reclaimed about 112 acres of their land.
“Managed retreat might be our only way in the future because maintaining all 1.5 miles in the long term is not viable,” said Mr Wrinch.
The family received support from the Essex Coast Organisation (ECO), set up by farmers to examine and challenge the withdrawal of sea-wall maintenance by the EA.
ECO has developed a good working relationship with the regional EA representative and the agency’s Anglian Regional Flood and Coastal Committee has now committed an annual £19,500 to provide materials, labour and plant costs for small-scale maintenance works.
Andrew St Joseph, farmer and head of ECO, said: “By intervening early, repairs stay small, allowing the EA to focus its reduced resources on more complex repairs.
“Years ago it would take two months and a written application to acquire permission. Now, with increasing trust between us and the local EA representative, it requires just a telephone call for small-scale works.”