Main beach at Australia’s Byron Bay disappears during storms

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The main beach at Australia’s Byron Bay has all-but disappeared as the country’s north-east coast is smashed by wild storms for a fifth straight day, forcing widespread evacuations.     

A 1,000km (620 mile) stretch of coast is being hit with torrential rain and the ‘abnormally high’ tides, which battered beaches that have already been depleted and weakened due to previous erosions. 

Coastal management experts say the situation is particularly bad because of erosion that has been occurring over recent months. And now 26ft tides have washed away huge sections of loose sand and also brought down trees along the banks. 

High seas have destroyed some of the most famous beaches along the coast, including the main beach at Byron Bay in northern NSW home to Hollywood A-listers such as Chris Hemsworth.  

As water levels continued to rise due to the heavy overnight rains which shut low-lying roads, New South Wales state emergency services directed hundreds of residents of several regional towns to move to safer places.

The cyclonic conditions, generated by an intense low-pressure system off the Queensland coast, have swallowed beaches and submerged large swathes of the heavily populated regions between NSW and Queensland state borders. 

The storm also whipped up thick sea foams, a rare event, along the beaches in Gold Coast that attracted families and children to play in the bubbles, footage on social media showed.

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology said the heavy rains are expected to weaken by late Tuesday or early Wednesday but warned isolated thunderstorms may still generate localised heavy falls triggering flash floods.

Australia is passing through a summer expected to be dominated by the La Nina phenomenon, typically associated with greater rainfall and more tropical cyclones – a sharp contrast to the massive bushfires that razed the country last summer.

‘We’ve been warned by the weather experts that La Nina will have an impact over summer in the eastern coast of Australia so we need to expect the unexpected,’ NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian told Australian Broadcasting Corp television.

‘I’m hoping what we’ve seen in the last few days won’t be repeated frequently over summer, but it could. Our weather experts tell us they are expecting conditions worse than what we’ve seen in quite a number of years.’        

‘Right now around Byron, we’ve got some severe weather, massive swells, we’re watching our beach disappear,’ said Byron mayor Simon Richardson on Monday.

‘What we’ve got here is yet another event. An extreme weather event coming on the back of climate change that our community’s dealing with. It’s about the fourth or fifth major event in the last couple of years.’  

Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology had warned coastal erosion, hazardous rain and huge waves off the coast would continue through Monday. 

‘Major coastal erosion is ongoing along numerous beaches in northeast NSW and southeast Queensland as spring tides combined with large waves and gale force easterly winds eat away sand from beaches,’ meteorologist Dean Narramore said.  

Up to 300 miles of the east coast is in danger of flooding because of the large weather system which brought much-needed rain to help tackle bushfires.  

‘Many of the impacts from this weather event will be similar to a category one cyclone event,’ Queensland’s emergency services minister Mark Ryan told ABC.

Australia is expecting a wetter than usual summer this year due to a La Nina weather phenomenon, typically associated with greater rainfall and more tropical cyclones. 

The wet conditions contrast with the fierce bushfires that ravaged world heritage-listed Fraser Island in Queensland in recent weeks. 

On Monday, fire evacuation points on Fraser Island were underwater due to high tides and huge waves.   

The storms come just over a week after a heatwave swept through much of the region, sending temperatures soaring to 95F (35C) in some areas.

Scientists say climate change is fuelling more extreme weather in Australia – including droughts, bushfires and cyclones – which will only worsen as global temperatures rise.

The country is one of the world’s leading fossil fuel exporters and recent polling shows that Australians are increasingly concerned about climate change.