Northern Gold Coast Beach Protection Strategy
In a bid to protect one of the Coast’s most valuable assets – our beaches – the Gold Coast City Council has implemented an award winning major coastal protection strategy.
The $9 million Northern Gold Coast Beach Protection Strategy identified the following objectives:
- widen the beach and dunes along the Surfers Paradise Esplanade to increase the volume of sand within the storm buffer and provide additional public open space
- improve surf quality at Narrowneck by the construction of a submerged reef to stabilise the nourished beaches
More than 1.1 million cubic meters of sand has been dredged from the Broadwater and deposited on Surfers Paradise beaches - 1.1 million cubic meters would fill a football field to a depth of 220 metres.
Artificial reef
The nationally acclaimed protection strategy has been one of Council’s most publicised projects gaining the attention of scientists from across Australia and the world.
The protection strategy aimed to protect and stabilise the beach from Narrowneck to Surfers Paradise. The widening of the beach area and also the new turf areas along Surfers Paradise Esplanade have given the community every reason to get active and enjoy the great outdoors.
The project won a Queensland Earth environment award recognising the innovation and introduction of the completely new strategy.
How did we build it?
The Artificial Reef is intended as an off-shore defence mechanism against beach erosion, but also aims to improve surfing conditions at Narrowneck Beach.
Complex mathematics and laboratory testing of combinations of tides, wave heights and direction were used to develop the reef to enhance surfing conditions.
Development of the reef began in August 1999 when Gold Coast contractors McQuade Marine began depositing the huge 150 to 300-tonne sandbags into position. Soil Filters, Australia, manufactured the sandbags from geotextile material.
The construction involved unrolling the geotextile bags into the hopper of the McQuade dredge; the dredge then fills the bag with sand. When the bag is filled, it is sealed and the dredge positions itself above the site of the reef. The dredge then splits along its length and opens to allow the sand filled geotextile bag to drop to the seabed.
