Situation update

After the Christmas period and more than a month since the Storm surge, it is worth updating people about the situation on Havergate.

The worst of the flooding on the island has passed with long meadow now all but drained of water, main/gullery/north are still holding a lot of water but at least some of the higher islands are starting to emerge.

Long meadow almost back to normal

Main still holding a lot of water

Belpers and Dovey’s are now back to normal levels, however it looks like the rubble from the internal wall has blocked the water control pipe at Cottage flood so we may have to wait for a digger to clear that and restore proper water control over Cottage flood and Belpers.

Damaged Internal wall at Cottage flood

Now that the worst of the flooding has gone from Doveys we can really assess the damage done to the walls. Certainly the short term effect of the saline flooding is much reduced at Havergate, as the site is already salty, salt water flooding does not have the same severity as on fresh water systems. However,  as the walls are now so badly damaged any more big tides or flooding will cause the almost complete destruction of the walls which will put the long term future of the saline lagoons into doubt instead converting them to inter-tidal mud flats. It is worth mentioning at this point that saline lagoon is an extremely rare habitat in England with the last census suggesting there was only 1000 hectares left in England of which Havergate holds 70 hectares.

Doveys seawall

Time is required to dry the volunteer huts out, here you can see huts with the carpets stripped out. I am really hoping that if we can dry out the chip board then we will not have to replace the entire floor which will include virtually having to take the entire hut apart. Not something to be taken lightly.

Also thankfully the toilet block seems to have almost serenely dropped back into place, water is still too high to look for any structural damage but once this has been cleaned out it should be good for public use.

Any attempts to clean the island out are being severely hampered by the current spell of exceptionally bad weather. I can’t remember in my time working in the conservation sector a spell like this with rain and wind almost constant.

At a reserve level we have an action plan to combat the after effects and we are hoping to get a digger out there in the next month or so to do some emergency repairs to the walls. Longer term we are working on a plan that will involve helping to make the site more sustainable and resilent to potential future storm surges.

It seems likely that when we do reopen at some point in the next three months or so we will not have repaired the hides and it may be some time till we have adequate viewing facilities for main and to a lesser extent Gullery lagoon. Some kind of short term screen may be constructed using parts of main lagoon.

It will be a long process and this is only the beginning. If you would like to support the efforts to repair not just Havergate but all the reserves effected by the storm surge please visit our website.