SHORE TO RISE
On a sunny day in Wellington’s Ōwhiro Bay in late June, heaters were drying out the carpet at Ewan Pohe’s seafront home as he waited for an insurance assessor to arrive.
This was not Pohe’s first storm, and it certainly won’t be his last. His house sits in the middle of the horseshoe-shaped bay, across the road from a stony beach that looks out towards Antarctica. It was the only one damaged.
“It turned out to be a bit of a non-event; it probably caused a few thousand dollars of damage,” says Pohe, who has lived at Ōwhiro Bay since 1988 and sees waves break over the road a few times a year.
The storm was expected to be much worse, more powerful than the April 2020 storm that sent waves crashing through the bottom storey of Pohe’s house, causing about $120,000 of damage. One resident was hospitalised after being knocked over by a wave.
It was a wake-up call for local residents and the Wellington City Council. “The place is like a bomb zone after a storm,” says Pohe, who has moved between roles in academia and owning small businesses over the years. “But if they had a sea wall here, nothing would have happened.”
STAY OR GO?
A handful of sea walls are what keep the communities of Wellington’s southern coast intact. They protect the road, council infrastructure and, indirectly, houses. One wall ends about 200m from Pohe’s house. He wants it extended to buffer him and his neighbours from the sea. “It’s relatively minor compared with the other sea walls they’ve built around Wellington. But for whatever reason, they’ve forgotten about us,” he says.
It’s more complicated than that. Wellington City Council and local authorities all over the country face the dilemma of deciding whether to shore up coastal defences or begin the “managed retreat” experts suggest will become inevitable as sea-level rise leads to more damaging storm surges, flooding and coastal erosion.
A report by Victoria University of Wellington researchers, released in December and funded by the Deep South National Science Challenge, showed that our largest cities have about 10,000 houses in one-in-100-year coastal flood zones.
In Wellington, 10cm of sea-level rise would boost the probability of a flood by five times, meaning that once-in-a-century disasters could soon occur every 20
