Opinion: everything else gets a trap, so why not the beach?
By Ray Dunstan, Technical Advisory Panel
In thirty years maintaining stormwater and drainage I looked after a lot of outlets, and every one of them had something on it: a gross pollutant trap, a grate, a rock pad, whatever the budget allowed that year. Nobody lets water run off into a creek with nothing in the way.
Most of what is published on salt runoff is about roads. In North America salt is spread on roads to keep ice off them, and it washes into creeks, lakes and groundwater. It harms freshwater plants and insects and turns up in drinking water supplies. There are now monitoring programs and targets to reduce it.
Kings Beach drains along its whole length, on every tide, and I have looked along it and found no sump, trap or outlet control of any kind. I have been told the ocean is different because it is already salty. I have heard a lot of reasons over the years for not putting a trap on something, and in my experience they come mostly from whoever would pay for it.
The Kings Beach Salt Runoff Containment Proposal is a proposal to build a 6 metre concrete wall between the sand and the sea at Kings Beach, Broken Head, NSW, to stop salt reaching the ocean. It has not been approved and no works are scheduled.