Transcript of Face the Facts
Radio 4 — 4th August 2006

FACE THE FACTS
Dredging
Presenter: John Waite
TRANSMISSION: Friday 4th August 2006 1230-1300 BBC RADIO 4

WAITE
This week we've travelled to Montrose, on the north east coast of Scotland, where locals believe that dredging operations at the town's small port are destroying their coastline, threatening the area's internationally renowned wildlife and causing Montrose's most famous landmark - its centuries old golf course - to literally fall into the sea. But residents have no say over what happens. A feeling of powerlessness that's not unique to Montrose. From Mostyn in North Wales to Bathside Bay in Essex, the impact of ports and their dredging activities is causing growing concern to local people, MPs and scientists - who question whether Britain's port operators are putting profit before protecting the UK's vulnerable coastline.

WELSH WOMAN
We've been ignored, I feel we've been ignored. Our views aren't taken into consideration. Every time the dredging company seems to win.

WEIR
I would like to see democratic accountability. I would like to see local people having control over local resources around the seashore.

SCIENTIST
This is very similar to sitting on a branch and slowly sawing off the branch in the position between where you're sitting and the main trunk of the tree.

WAITE
With a population of 12,000 Montrose is a bustling little place which caters for a steady stream of tourists. Most attracted by the town's ancient links golf course, the fifth oldest in the world, and its three miles of beach. Attractions that in recent years have both come under threat:

RICE
Coming in there is the river to the south of the town, the South Esk,0 you can hear the sea now very easily.

WAITE
Montrose born and bred, local newspaper columnist Denis Rice:

RICE
And that is a river that has a dock, which is connected with the oil business in the North Sea. And even transatlantic freighters come in there now. And this of course leads to local arguments about whether the dredging of that river, the considerable dredging, to facilitate big boats coming in has added to the speed of the erosion.

WAITE
The first people to use Montrose's deep natural harbour were probably the Vikings. Over the centuries, it's traded in salmon, or slaves, as well as once being a whaling centre. It became a trust port and independent in 1837; and saw its fortunes rise again in the recent North Sea oil boom, so that it's now the biggest pulp handling port in Scotland with ambitious plans to attract in cruise ships by offering berths for liners.

SCOTT
We went down for our picnics and obviously for our paddling and swimming. All summer we went. When you've got a beach you use it.

WAITE
Kathleen Scott grew up in Montrose after the war. And holiday snaps show quite clearly how dramatically its coastline has changed.

SCOTT
When there was low tide, you felt you walked a long way out. I suppose a 100 yards would be a bit exaggerated. But considering now you probably only walk about 10 yards or 15 yards - it was certainly 50 or 60 yards at low tide - and there used to be the puddles that we paddled through on our way to the actual sea. There's very beach left. Well you can see that from that picture can't you.

WAITE
According to the local, Angus, council, Montrose's beach was actually growing until around 1970. Since when, it's shrunk by nearly 40 metres. And Kathleen's not the only local to spot a sea-change in the last few decades.

BAIRD
Well it's just over a 1,000 hectares - 750 hectares of that is mud. Half my farm's in the reserve...

WAITE
Grant Baird is a farmer on the edge of Montrose basin - Britain's biggest inland salt water basin that lies behind the town's port and is fed by the same twice-daily tidal cycle which brings in a rich soup of nutrients that attracts over 50,000 migratory birds a year. Pink-footed geese from Iceland, knots from Siberia and salmon travelling from arctic Canada all congregate at this internationally renowned wildlife reserve and site of special scientific interest to feed on the mudflats, exposed at low tide.

BAIRD
Tiny, tiny shells - that's one of the things that forms the basis of the food chain, yep tiny little shells.

WAITE
Grant Baird, too, an adviser to the Scottish Wildlife Trust, says he's noticed a change in the landscape.

BAIRD
I certainly think this north western corner of the basin is silting up a little bit. Some of the drains that run out on to the basin have no run - there's no gradient for the water to run into the basin anymore - they've completely silted up so a lot of the land down here just won't drain anymore.

WAITE
Despite the basin's importance, however, the Scottish Wildlife Trust told us it has never been consulted over the dredging activities at the neighbouring port.

Montrose port authority radio

WAITE
Donald Cameron is a local lobster fisherman and life boatman who also looks after Montrose's lighthouse. He's lived by the harbour all 56 years of his life and seen at first hand how the coastal mouth has changed.

CAMERON
Well this is the estuary of the South Esk. We have sand at one side, rocks on the other. This is the Annat bank - the sand bank that stretches well out to sea, as far you can - probably about half a mile. It used to be a lot higher than it is just now. Quite a stable arrangement, there's a lot of marram grass in it...

WAITE
There's a seal over there behind us.

CAMERON
There used to be quite a big colony of terns nested every year but once it was dredged the sand fell back into the river to make up what was taken out, and gradually the Annat0 bank was eroded away until it was virtually nothing at all.

WAITE
Locals like Donald pinpoint the early '70s as seeing the start of problems when the port expanded - changing its size and layout. The North Sea oil boom saw a new terminal built, which required blocking part of the river South Esk, reclaiming a sizeable area of adjacent land and dredging deeper, to permit oil supply vessels, which service the rigs - whatever the state of the tide. Dredging that's continued virtually every year since. So could scouring out a million tonnes of sand over the years be to blame for the erosion of the local coastline? Andrew Cooper is professor of coastal studies at the university of Ulster.

COOPER
It would seem to me very unlikely that it would have no impact - I mean that's a very big volume of sand. And the shape of any given estuary and beach system in northern Britain is a function of the volume of sand that's there and the dynamics that affect it at any given time. And if you adjust any one of those you're bound to see a response in the shape of the coastline.

WAITE
And of course as one local said to me if it's the dunes today, it'll be the town tomorrow.

COOPER
That's the case, this is very similar to sort of sitting on a branch and slowly sawing off the branch in the position between where you're sitting and the main trunk of the tree. Removing sand from the system like this is causing it to become unstable and ultimately destroying it.

WAITE
So in your view Professor Cooper, there is a most definite link between this dredging in Montrose harbour and the erosion around its local coast?

COOPER
Yes it seems that way to me. The coincidence in timing between the onset of erosion here at Montrose and the industrial scale dredging strike me as rather more than a coincidence.

WAITE
Every commercial port has a statutory duty to dredge the seabed to ensure that shipping doesn't become grounded. Montrose is no exception. And so, in the 1970s, when the port expanded, a bigger navigational channel was carved out. But every year, sand from nearby beaches in effect caves back in to the channel. So, the port's dredger, which can extract up to a hundred thousand tonnes a year, has been in the habit of dumping its loads miles out at sea where it's lost from the local ecosystem forever.

HARBOUR CONTROL
Afternoon harbour control

WAITE
Hello it's John Waite, Face the Facts Radio 4 to see the chief executive.

HARBOUR CONTROL
Do you know how to find the harbour office?

WAITE
Yeah, yes.

HARBOUR CONTROL
It's ney bother - cheers.

WAITE
Okay.
With locals pinning the blame on the port for Montrose's increasing erosion, we headed for the port authority offices, to speak to chief executive Captain Harry Johansen.
Harry Johansen, how much sand would you estimate has been dredged from this port here at Montrose over the last 20 years?

JOHANSEN
Oh, 20 years, we average between 40,000 to up to 90,000 cubic metres per annum.

WAITE
So that's well over a million tonnes, would you say over the 20 years?

JOHANSEN
If your maths say so, I would probably agree with that.

WAITE
And would you admit that since the early 1970s dredging activities have increased significantly.

JOHANSEN
No, well I've been here since '85 and the dredging has been mainly irrelevant to the weather conditions prevailing during the winter period.

WAITE
So since the 1970s actually dredging hasn't increased, is that what you're saying, that the amount of dredging - when we talk about that million tonnes, sounds like a lot of dredging has gone on?

JOHANSEN
Well as I say on average we get out between 40,000 to 90,000 cubes per annum. And over a 20 year period it's not even - it's not a million tonnes is it?

WAITE
Well 10 90s would be 900,000...

JOHANSEN
Well it's my maths then.

WAITE
You see scientists that we've heard from making this programme say that by dredging the port it helps erosion along the coast.

JOHANSEN
I would err - they're the scientists, but under our experiences the only movement of material really is because of the weather conditions prevailing at the time. It's not the actual dredging that's causing the problem - in my opinion, it's not causing the problem.

WAITE
Try telling that to many of the 1300 members of Montrose's famous links golf course. One in six locals play golf here - on what's one of the most ancient courses in the world.
Just tell us a bit more about the course, you say it's the fifth oldest, it goes back to the 1500s doesn't it?

CROWE
0Fifteen sixty two is the earliest recorded golf. A young lad - James Melville - noted in his diary: Having lessons for the game of gowf - from his teacher at that time -1562. It could probably be earlier than that.

WAITE
Alan Crowe is chairman of the Montrose Links Trust Ltd, the custodians of the course which, steeped in history, brings in players from all over the world. But what's its future, with erosion already causing the tee at the fifth hole to fall into the sea?
As you walk up here you get a very good view, Alan, don't you of the huge chunk of this bit of the coast that's been bitten out, literally, it's like a great gulp has been taken by the sea.

CROWE
Just a big chunk, as you say, that's been gouged out. And the dune form has dramatically dropped.

WAITE
So it's this curious view really - I mean walking parallel to us because there's a match on today are all these keen golfers - they're just a few yards to our left - then there's a fence to stop them literally falling into the sea - because that's how close it's got to their game!

CROWE
Yeah, yeah. And the out of bounds line has obviously had to be changed to take into account the fence.

WAITE
Alan is not alone in wanting to see the sand dredged from the local 0harbour deposited back on the local beach to help stem local erosion. But a recent news report put paid to that.

BBC RADIO SCOTLAND
92-95 FM, 810 Medium Wave and On Digital, BBC Radio Scotland.

Thousands of tonnes0 of sand are being moved from Montrose to secure the future of Aberdeen beach. The city is in danger of losing its golden sands because of coastal erosion. The Scottish Executive has announced it will help fund the scheme to dredge sand from Montrose harbour, after a scheme to pump in sand from the Firth of Forth was rejected.

CROWE
Couldn't believe it, to start with, I mean just incredible that suddenly this massive press release saying that all this sand was being transported 40 miles up the coast to recharge the beach at Aberdeen when we can't use it to charge our beach here. It's just unbelievable.

WAITE
Coastal expert Professor Andrew Cooper is also surprised.

0COOPER
It seems like a very strange approach to take as far as I'm concerned. I don't know the situation at Aberdeen where they're taking the sand to, but it's certainly not doing the beach at Montrose any good.

WAITE
And it's not just dredging inshore - within a port or harbour - which is accused of disturbing and possibly destroying local ecosystems. Many communities around the country say their coastline has been damaged by off-shore operations.

DOBBS
This was a uniformly sandy beach, there's some old postcards that I've got and lots of local people have got photos that show this as a very uniformly sandy beach. There was odd outcrop of rocky material on the beach, but nothing like the exposure of rock and peat that you've got at the present time.

WAITE
Tony Dobbs is leader of Gower SOS campaign - which has been fighting to end the dredging activities off the South Wales coast for 10 years. Only now is a public enquiry being held to investigate whether the erosion of local beaches is linked to the extraction of millions of tonnes of marine sand for the construction industry.

DOBBS
Initially the dredging company's position was that there was no changes on the beaches since they started dredging. Slowly they've changed from that position, and recently have undertaken quite a bit of research into what might be occurring. And now they agree that this beach has changed dramatically in the past 20 to 30 years. There's no disagreement with ourselves and dredging company over the fact there has been a change. The disagreement comes over what has been the causative factor in that change.

WAITE
There are fairly extensive rules in place governing offshore dredging. But dredging a port is a different matter. Once a port has been created by an act of parliament then dredging to make the facility accessible to ships is seen as an essential right of the port owners. Which gives them a great deal of power. Take the case of Montrose:
READING The authority may deepen, widen, dredge, scour and improve the bed and foreshore of the harbour and of the approaches to the harbour and may blast any rock within the harbour or in the approaches thereto.
...any materials taken up or collected in the course of such operations shall be the property of the authority and may be used, sold, removed, deposited or otherwise disposed of as the authority may think fit.

WAITE
And port dredging - according to government figures we've seen - removes twice as much material from the seabed each year as offshore dredging does.
Ports do need a 0licence, however, to dump dredged materials at sea. Which Montrose port has. Not that that reassures Professor Cooper who believes the whole system of ancient acts of parliament and ad-hoc licenses doesn't provide the proper scrutiny for a port's dredging activities:

COOPER
I don't think it's fair to say that just because something has a licence that it's acceptable. The licensing process will be a bureaucratic box ticking exercise. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to challenge the kind of assessments that are involved in that process. And then once they're approved they take on a life of their own as this particular example shows us.

WAITE
In Scotland, it's the job of the Fisheries Research Services to consult interested parties about any plan to dump dredged sand at sea. Groups like Scottish Natural Heritage whose website suggests that the coast is in safe hands:
READING
Our basic philosophy is simple: we must care for and sustain our natural heritage if we want it to sustain us. Our goal is to make sure that people can benefit from the natural heritage tomorrow - because everyone has looked after it today.
Scottish Natural Heritage, however, has raised no objections to Montrose port's annual dumping out at sea. Nor has it suggested that the dredged sand be used to stabilise the local beach, or tried to veto the latest scheme to ship the sand from Montrose harbour up to Aberdeen. And that's because SNH doesn't believe that there is a link between inshore dredging and local erosion, as its Dr Alistair Rennie explained to me when we met on Montrose's shifting sands.
The scientists that we've have been speaking to say if you take a million tonnes of sand out of a system and you dump it out at sea, that has got to have an impact on the local environment - a million tonnes over the years, has it not?

RENNIE
The works are licensed and they're assessed as to whether they have an impact. By the very definition if they have a licence they will have been assessed, and they are not having an impact on the designated interest. The dredging probably predates the designation which means we look at it in those terms and rightly so.

WAITE
That is the problem though, Dr Rennie, isn't it, this dredging has been going on for decades, perhaps hundreds of years, its something that is automatic and has always been done. But in recent years when the dredging amounts have gone up and up and up, there are people now saying we need to look at this because the situation has probably changed, and we cannot be sure of what the impact is, but there will be one.

RENNIE
I - from our - well from our understanding on the beach here the changes at Montrose are related to larger scale processes that I would suggest aren't directly related to the dredging in Montrose harbour.

WAITE
But can I draw something in the sand for you? This is how one local person explained to me. If I scoop out here a large chunk of this sand right, so we make a trench, in other words I've dredged up that sand. Look what happens, they say, at the side -the sand from the side starts to fall back in to fill that trench. And that is what they say is happening here - that that trench is in fact the dredging operation just around the corner and the sort of hole it creates is filled in by sand tumbling off the beach by the golf course here.

RENNIE
From our understanding, the sand that is being dredged is beach sand, so it's left this bit of beach that we are standing on at the moment, so what happens to it afterwards won't affect this stretch of beach. Our understanding is this stretch of coast, the southern end of Montrose links, is eroding because of much larger scale processes than the dredging operations.

WAITE
But that - believes Professor Andrew Cooper - flies in the face of both science and common sense. And he simply can't agree.

COOPER
No - very much not. That sand is going into the harbour and then into the submerged delta. If it's dredged and not put back into the system, then simply more sand is taken from the beach and carried into the harbour area. So instead of recycling the same volume, the system is taking more and more sand out of the beach and the sand dunes and that's what's producing the long term erosion.

WAITE
Long term erosion which was the subject of a specialist report - commissioned by Angus council - responsible for the area's sea defences. It asked consultancy firm, Halcrow, to investigate why Montrose's beach was disappearing, whilst neighbouring beaches appeared to be growing. And one of the observations in the resulting Halcrow Report, which appeared in 1998, was that recharging the beach every year with the sand dredged from the town's port, could eventually reduce expected erosion by up to 70% . To Angus Council's Ronnie McNeil, though, such a plan is not an option.

MCNEIL
If sand was placed back on the beach in such a way that it was to be retained on the beach, and that would require further additional engineering measures, just recharging the beach with sand, in other words just placing it back on the beach, would not keep the sand there for any length of time at all, that could disappear, as much sand as you could put on that beach could disappear in the space of a few days and a few weeks. So clearly you would be continually bringing that sand back for it to be just washed away again.

WAITE
But the Halcrow Report, you commissioned that report, didn't they suggest that if the sand dredged Montrose port was put back on the beach it could prevent 70% of erosion over the next 50 years?

MCNEIL
Well, sorry I don't know.

WAITE
When you say you don't know you mean you don't know what's in the report?

MCNEIL
I don't know here and now whether the bits of the report you are quoting to me are consistent with the advice that we got from Halcrow regarding what was the best way forward in terms of managing the erosion at Montrose.

WAITE
Well another bit of the Halcrow Report makes the point that the amounts of sand lost from the beach each year at Montrose seemed roughly equal to the amounts being dredged from the port there. Again an expert opinion, but which isn't shared by port authority chief executive Harry Johansen. He thinks the experts - like the locals - are wrong.
Halcrow says the amount of dredging and I quote, "appears to be in line with the estimated losses of sediment from the beach". Halcrow seems to think there's some kind of connection or at least the quantities of sand are the same, that come out of the port in front of us and come off the beach round the corner.

MCNEIL
I would dispute that.

WAITE
But they're the experts aren't they.

MCNEIL
Well they're consultants. There's a big difference. (laughs)

WAITE
I mean they're consultants because they are supposed to know their stuff.

MCNEIL
Well that's a matter of opinion

WAITE
But Halcrow says that erosion has been occurring at between two and five metres a year since the 1970s and that that has increased. And once again of course that's the timescale that dredging in the port here has been going on. Now is all this coincidence?

MCNEIL
Could be. I'm not going to get drawn into this at all.

WAITE
But how much local accountability is there from you to the local community? We've had local community leaders say that you have been doing, and it seems you are entitled to do pretty much what you like and what you like is maybe not what they like.

MCNEIL
No, we're not entitled to do what we like, we have various guidelines and acts that we must comply with in our operation.

WAITE
But you can put the sediment pretty well where you like as long as you get permission...

MCNEIL
We must get permission first.

WAITE
But where you put it is not where they like, that's the thing isn't it?

MCNEIL
Where who likes, the local community? But that's - I've got no say over that.

WAITE
But you're part of the local community. This is the port for the ...

MCNEIL
End. That's it.

WAITE
But that isn't it. It's not the end. As many of Britain's ports face dredging deeper navigational channels to cope with ever-bigger ships, more local campaigns are making the link between dredging and coastal erosion:

NEWS MONTAGE
The ships of world trade just keep on getting bigger and so it seems must Felixstowe. Today government approval for another huge expansion of the Suffolk port. It all comes just weeks after approval was given for an even bigger development at nearby Bathside Bay.
The Dee Estuary is one of Britain's most valuable wildlife areas. Home to around 120,000 wading birds. But there are fears that this rich diversity is threatened by plans to dredge a small area on the Welsh side of the river near the port of Mostyn.

WAITE
So who is ultimately accountable for the environmental impact of ports? In the case of established ports like Montrose, the environment is only considered when dredged sand is dumped. Which in Montrose's case is up the coast on Aberdeen's beach. A multimillion pound project largely funded by the Scottish Executive.

BRANKIN
This solution brings sand from a local source. It's more environmentally friendly because it comes from the same coastal cell, so it's more suitable, for this particularly kind of sand to be brought to Aberdeen beach and it also is a really good solution for beach users.

WAITE
Not though Montrose's "beach users". When we asked to interview a minister from the Scottish Executive, no one, we were told, was available. Instead, we were issued with a statement:

STATEMENT
The Aberdeen Bay scheme meets the executive's various technical, environmental and economic criteria, therefore, the decision to approve funding stands. Ministers cannot intervene in ports authorities matters.

And it was the same story when we approached DEFRA, the Department for the Environment, which oversees offshore dredging activities. No one was prepared to be interviewed. Though a review of dredging licences is likely, we were told, in the forthcoming Marine Bill, if, that is, there's sufficient parliamentary time.
But here in Montrose, and coastal communities like it, it's time that's running out say the locals. If we continue every year to dredge and dump up to 50 million tonnes of sand from our ports, then homes and places rich in history, and internationally important for wildlife, could be lost to the waves forever.