Byron Bay restaurant narrowly avoids being swept into the Pacific Ocean
A Byron Bay restaurant narrowly avoided disaster in the early hours of Monday morning, when enormous swells smashed into the dunes almost washing the venue into the Pacific Ocean.
The Beach Byron Bay restaurant is owned by Ben Kirkwell and co-owned by the Fink family.
Mr Kirkwell believes they "dodged a bullet" in this incident, saying that a six-layer wall of sandbags was installed in November and this assisted in sparing the building as did the easterly swell direction.
"The waves were whitecapping across the bay and smashing into Belongil and Main Beach and we had big surf crashing over the sandbags at the foot of our restaurant," he told AAP.
"At the end of day we are looking like we might have dodged a bullet so we're very lucky in that," he said.
Mr Kirkwell believes the scale of erosion is due to a combination of factors. He said in addition to man-made climate change, it was an east coast low-pressure system, longshore drift, king tides and easterly swells combining at the same time.
"They say this is a once-in-100-years storm, this is a once-in-a-generation type erosion event, so look it could happen, maybe not in my lifetime, but it could happen again," Mr Kirkwell said.
"Who knows, 2020 has been a hell of a year, we could get cyclones or anything still coming in so you never know what's around the corner.
15th December 2020
