Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Dredgers will this summer gouge a hole a kilometre wide in the middle
of one of the North Sea’s most important crab breeding sites, where researchers
last year caught more than 8000 crabs – the largest haul ever taken in British
waters.

Last month, environment minister John Gummer gave the National Rivers
Authority approval to dredge 1.2 million cubic metres of sand from the Race
Bank off the north Norfolk coast this year. The sand will be used to rebuild
eroded Lincolnshire beaches.

Ministers admitted that the research they commissioned into the impact
dredging would have on the ecosystem of the bank, including fish spawning
and nursery areas, would not be complete until after the first year’s dredging
had ended. But the scientists from the University of Hull who are carrying
out the surveys submitted an interim report in November. According to Lindsay
Murray of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food’s fisheries laboratory
at Burnham-on-Crouch, who is leading the investigation, the surveys have
found crabs across more than 100 square kilometres of the Norfolk coast
and show that ‘the bank is part of an important crab fishery and breeding
²µ°ù´Ç³Ü²Ô»å’.

‘The large mature breeding animals occur in the offshore area around
the Race Bank, in the proposed extraction area,’ she says. A separate study
last July found a ‘high density of crab larvae over the bank’.

Initial dredging approval is for one year. But the NRA says it wants
to extract more than 50 million cubic metres from the bank over the next
50 years, as part of a £200 million beach rebuilding programme. This
year, the dredgers will work only between August and October, which is after
young crabs have hatched, but includes the peak of the crab-fishing season.

Ron Linfield of the NRA says replenishment of the beaches from Mablethorpe
to Skegness in Lincolnshire is vital to prevent waves undermining sea walls
and flooding the land behind. However, a study of the coastline five years
ago by the consultants Sir William Halcrow found that ‘the presence of sea
walls appears to exacerbate foreshore erosion’. Linfield says waves bounce
back off walls and wash the sand away.

The NRA wants to build the beaches 2 to 3 metres higher, and then top
them up each year. The Race Bank was chosen, says Linfield, because its
sand is the same grain size as that being washed away.

English Nature, the government’s conservation agency, has ‘cautiously
backed the NRA’s scheme’, says its head of coastal geomorphology, Richard
Leafe. ‘We favour recharging beaches rather than building new sea walls,’
he says.

But he warned that engineers should be less choosy about the type of
sand they use. ‘They like to be able to predict exactly what will happen
by replacing like with like. But if replenishment is to be used widely,
engineers will have to be more flexible and accept some uncertainty. We
would much prefer them to take sand for beach replenishment from existing
dredging areas.’

Defending the crab fishery is ‘beyond our remit’, says Leafe. ‘That’s
MAFF’s job.’ Ironically, when Gummer was agriculture minister two years
ago, he promised Norfolk fishermen that he would ‘fight all the way’ to
prevent permanent dredging on the Race Bank.