The Storms That Shook the South West

The barrage of storms that have battered

the south-west in recent months have caused a trail of coastal

destruction unlike anything the region has seen in living memory.

They caused millions of pounds worth of damage to

our roads and railways...

..to our homes and businesses...

..and to our coastal defences.

In this programme, we assess the worst-hit areas

and we meet the people still reeling as they try to

rebuild their homes, their lives and their livelihoods.

Complete and utter devastation. Just looked like a war zone, to be honest.

The waves were starting to hit the rocks

and then hit the side of my train.

Bam! Bam! It's terrifying.

Then you could see the white water through the railway lines,

and then each wave was taking away the tarmac. So it's...yes.

We've really got to go.

We meet the experts who say wild weather

is something we might have to get used to.

All the indications are that if you look back,

this is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

But if you look forward, they're going to become more frequent.

And we ask the big question - for those living on the edge,

is it time to rebuild or retreat?

Amid all the drama of the winter storms,

one sight above all beggared belief -

the south-west of England's main rail line destroyed.

On February 4, mountainous seas,

driven by an unusual south-easterly wind, ripped it apart,

leaving the line and a question hanging - could it ever be rebuilt?

Two months and £35 million worth of repairs later,

you'd be hard-pressed to know that anything much had happened here.

But happen it certainly did,

and the ferocious weather that smashed through the sea wall

and the track that runs on top of it

has left its mark on people's lives, too.

Right in the path of the storm was Daryl Fensom's morning train.

Took the train at 8:30.

Regular commute, apart from the fact it was a bit windy.

Then as we were approaching the train station here,

maybe 200-300 metres behind, noticed that the waves were starting

to hit the rocks, go over the rocks and then hit the side of my train.

Bam! Bam! It's terrifying.

Daryl found himself trapped in what felt like a giant carwash

on the section of line that, 12 hours later, collapsed.

And were you scared?

Yes, definitely scared.

In my mind, I'm running through what would happen

if the train started to give way, if the train had fallen aside.

-What would I do?

-You're working out a plan?

-Yeah, yeah, definitely.

-Your own evacuation plan?

-Yeah, yeah.

-What was it?

Pick up stuff, run towards the door

and hold onto the pole near the door itself.

Luckily, it didn't come to that.

The train reversed away from Dawlish

and to the safety of a station further up the line.

But for the residents that live trackside, there was no easy escape.

As soon as the wall went, the stones are getting chucked up

from the ballast from the railway line.

And obviously, that's never happened before.

Shane Manning was at home with his family as the storm gathered force.

Then you could see the white water through the railway line,

and then each wave was taking away the tarmac, gripping it each time.

And that was inching towards the house. So it's...yes.

-We've really got to go.

-Shane got out in the nick of time.

Shortly after, his drive and part of his garage were washed away.

-Wow.

-You can see the cavity there.

-Yeah.

-So is a load of your stuff down in that pit?

-Yeah. Buried now.

-So is this pretty much as you left it, Shane?

-Yes.

How it was.

Shane still doesn't know whether his house can be repaired

or whether it needs to be completely rebuilt.

-Do you want to still live here?

-Oh, yeah. Oh, it's gorgeous.

Last few days, the sun's been out and I've really thought,

oh, I'm going to miss it in the summer. It is lovely down here.

-But will you feel safe here?

-Oh, yeah. Oh, totally.

-It could happen again!

-Well...

The weather could happen again but the amount of concrete and blocks

that they've put in in front, this house ain't going anywhere.

Amazingly, no-one was harmed in Dawlish that night.

Daryl Fensom couldn't believe his lucky escape.

A day later, I found out that the piece of land that my train

had actually stopped on didn't exist any more.

That really puts it into perspective.

I mean, if that had happened the day before,

goodness knows what could have happened to me.

The line reopened just in time for Easter.

We've had the orange army. Let's hear it for them.

But despite the success of the repair job here,

there remain big questions about the long-term future of this line

and big questions, too, for all who live and work on the coast.

At the Met Office in Exeter,

they've been analysing why the storms did so much damage.

So Helen, just describe what we're seeing here.

-This was the 4th, wasn't it?

-Yes.

This is the satellite sequence of 4 and 5 February,

so the storm that came along and did all the damage

to the Dawlish railway line.

The thing that was interesting about it

and caused the most damage is the fact that it had been

out over the Atlantic for a little while

and it generated great big swells that were coming towards the UK,

and those high swells, high seas, coincided with the high tides.

And then, as the low came in,

because of the way the winds blow round the low pressure,

you had a south-easterly wind blowing all of that sea

and strong wave action onshore onto Dawlish,

and that's why it caused the problem.

So it had been gathering force in the Atlantic,

but what caused it to form in the first place?

Well, it was formed because of the contrast between the really,

really cold air that we had over the States -

they had record-breaking low temperatures

and I think they had record-breaking snowfalls in places -

and that cold air went a very, very long way south, so it was

very close to the warm, tropical, moist air over the Caribbean.

And it's that contrast between very cold air and warm air that generates

our storms and our depressions that we get in this country.

But it also generates a very strong jetstream

that drove those storms towards us.

We measured that there were about 12 intense storms

that came through in that three-month period.

This three-mile stretch of soft sand at Perranporth

is one of the most popular resorts on the region's north coast.

And while the south coast bore the brunt of the winter storms,

the North didn't get off lightly.

As the sea surged in at Perranporth,

it started to wash away that coveted sand, the sand that,

quite literally, underpins this beachside business.

The Watering Hole boasts of being the UK's only bar on the beach.

Now, building directly onto sand might seem like an unwise choice,

but it's stood firm for the past 33 years.

That was until the February storms left it teetering on the edge.

Bob Job runs The Watering Hole with his son, Tom.

They were in the middle of major renovations when the storm hit.

The first storm came big-time. We're used to those.

And it literally ripped, probably, 15 feet away from here,

for the front 15 feet. That was a solid 15-foot drop,

so you're talking thousands of tonnes of sand that moved.

And we thought, that's it. We've survived that one. No problems.

And we had two or three days of it. It was pretty bad.

And then, three-and-a-half weeks later, it came again.

Bigger winds.

Bigger storm.

In all the years I've been here, I've never seen the sea like it,

in my travels abroad, surfing around the world. This is 40,

50 foot plus and stuff coming in on a beach in England.

Totally unheard-of, I'd have thought, and hopefully,

it'll be unheard-of ever again.

The sand that was lost from the beach in February

still hasn't returned.

In the meantime, Bob's shoring up his cafe

and even growing his business.

I mean, you're not just staying put.

-You are expanding here. You're investing.

-We're investing.

We've got to move forward, as my son said,

so that's what we're doing, yeah.

But if there are going to be more and more of these kind of

extreme weather events, this isn't the place to be running a business.

It makes it harder but someone's got to look after the place.

-You're just completely committed to it?

-Totally. Yeah.

While Bob's got the problem of not enough sand,

over in south-east Cornwall, they've now got too much of it.

The February storms left Nicky Berry's beach cafe buried

under tonnes of the stuff.

I can't believe, Nicky, you're having to dig this all up by hand.

Um... We've had pretty much no other choice.

We seem to have been digging forever.

We've cleared I don't know how many hundreds of thousands

of tonnes of sand.

The job involves painstakingly picking out remnants of

her shattered business, like dangerous shards of glass.

It's tiny little bits like this that are just going to

-go straight into a child's foot, aren't they?

-Absolutely. Yeah.

Nicky's cafe now sits below the level of the sand in front.

It used to be several metres above it.

That's because as the waves surged across this beach

time and time again, they dramatically reshaped it.

This stream has moved.

It used to run in a channel right in front of Nicky's cafe,

acting as a kind of protective moat.

Without it, there's nothing between her business and a high tide.

-So this could all be futile!

-It could.

-I hate to say it.

-Yeah, absolutely.

-My goodness!

-It could.

So in the meantime, you're just getting on with it?

-That's all we can do.

-Right.

-That's all we can do.

-OK, come on, then.

-Keep digging.

-Only a few hundred tonnes left.

-That's right.

One spade at a time.

Inside, things are slowly taking shape.

But Nicky will never forget what the sea did to her business.

Complete and utter devastation. It was nothing like that before.

It just looked like a war zone, to be honest.

The cafe itself was probably a foot, two foot of water and sand.

And the sea had just washed straight through the cafe.

And actually, the big heavy ice cream freezer, full of ice cream,

was actually floating in the middle of the actual cafe.

Unbelievable. I mean, I've never seen anything like it.

The only thing I can liken it to was, you know,

watching footage of sort of a tsunami.

-It's just been freak weather.

-But what if it's not freak?

-What if this is the way it's going to be now?

-Well, let's hope not!

-Well, that's it, really. Is it just hope?

-Yeah.

There's nothing we can do, is there? There's nothing we can do.

So fingers crossed for now.

But work going on just along the coast might one day offer

more than hope.

This is Loe Bar near Porthleven

and these are Plymouth University's storm chasers.

Claire Earlie and Paul Russell are studying the impact of wild weather

on our coastline to help planners work out what to do about it.

-Hello.

-Hello.

-Hi, Paul. Hello. Hi, Claire.

-Hi.

-Hi, Claire.

So tell me what you're doing here.

Well, as you know, the south-west was hit by some of the biggest

storm waves in living memory this winter.

And what we're doing here is we're measuring those waves,

but we're also measuring the impact on the coast.

And we're doing that in three specific ways.

We're measuring the beach erosion and accretion or build-up,

we're measuring the erosion of the cliff face, and we're also

measuring, excitingly, the mechanism by which the cliff erodes.

We've got a seismometer in the cliff that measures

the shaking of the cliff by the storm waves.

And Claire, what does this gadget do?

This is a laser scanner and this maps the surface of the cliff

and we come back monthly, and then we can

compare the consecutive scans and see how the cliff has changed over time.

And what has happened in the last few months?

Typically, we see about 2-3 centimetres of recession in a month,

and then, after the big storms that we've had,

we saw 2-3 metres of erosion.

-That's 100 times...

-Yes.

-..that amount.

-That's a lot of stuff, isn't it?

-Yeah.

In fact, the cliffs here suffered the biggest

battering of any in the south-west,

so we're using a gadget of our own...

..an airborne camera to give us an idea of what hit them.

Now, from their research,

Paul and Claire have discovered that the waves that pummelled

the shore here were an average of eight metres high.

Now, that might not sound very much,

but imagine that you are at the top of one of those waves as it swells

up to its full height and you get a sense of how fearsome they were.

We're talking waves as high as the roof of a two-storey house.

And they hit the Cornish coast here head-on, over and over again.

Claire filmed the onslaught.

It was pretty exciting, pretty terrifying as well.

We captured the high tide and the biggest waves of that storm...

..at the same time as the seismometer being in the ground,

capturing that movement as well.

The readings from the seismometer showed that the cliffs were

swaying by 5-8 millimetres every time a wave hit.

And it was that shaking that weakened them to breaking point.

But were these extraordinary conditions a one-off?

All the indications are that if you look back,

this is a once-in-a-lifetime event.

But if you look forward, they're going to become more frequent,

these extreme storms. So I think it's something we have got to

prepare for in the south-west and we've got to learn to live with.

Whatever the future holds, weather-wise, at

South Milton Sands in South Devon, there's now little left to lose.

When the Valentine's Day storm rolled in on 14 February,

lovers of this beach

could only watch as great chunks of it disappeared.

It was just quite unbelievable, just really almost couldn't take

it in, the force of the sea, and also, how high it felt.

It physically felt like a big sort of boiling mass.

It was really high up. It was really sad as well cos so much...

You know, this beach is just such a fantastic site

and it was sad to see so much destruction.

The waves swept away two-thirds of the sand dunes

which once stood here.

They'd been restored by the National Trust landowners

and local people just ten years earlier.

Those wooden posts mark where the front of the dunes

was before the storms. That is where the front of the dunes stands today.

It's all gone.

As one of the biggest coastal landowners in the country,

the National Trust faces tough decisions about where to rebuild

and where to let nature have its way.

Tony Flux is the trust's coast and marine adviser

and has been working with local people to find a solution.

-Hello, Rosie.

-Hiya. How are you? Are you all right?

-I'm not too bad.

-Nice to see you again.

-Yeah, you too.

So I expect you're quite pleased we're actually trying to

-put it right for the season.

-Really relieved.

Yeah, definitely cos it will help our business all the time,

just to have our second route coming in.

All our coastal sites are different

and they're all special in some way or other.

I think you've only got to look around you

and see what a beautiful location this is. And it's very popular.

It's very popular. And it's very precious to people.

These sort of iconic sites mean a great deal to them,

so it's not just in our interests.

It's in the public

and national interest to look after these sites as best we possibly can.

But one has to accept that they are dynamic.

It's the coast and change is not only inevitable, but sometimes,

as we've seen this winter, it can occur very, very quickly.

The trust tries to plan for its properties 100 years ahead.

Not an easy task when it comes to an ever-changing coastline.

All our coastal adaptation strategies,

all our coastal planning,

if you like, is working on the principle that we're going to

be dealing with an extra one metre of still water

over the next hundred years. Forget storms.

Just an extra metre of still water - where would high water mark be?

Well, it wouldn't be here. It would be there.

And on shallow beaches,

that's a real issue over the next hundred years.

The damaged coast road here is being rebuilt,

but not everywhere will get the same treatment.

There are places where the decision to repair

and renew is much more difficult to take.

Mullion Harbour, for example, in Cornwall,

is a case in point where the damage has been very significant.

What you don't want to do is have a situation where you're doing work,

you're spending money, you're using resource and you're

doing it year after year after year after year for no long-term gain.

The issue of what to protect

and what to abandon has long loomed over the Dorset town of Lyme Regis.

Landslips like these in the 1960s plague the town.

This stretch of coastline is constantly on the move and for

some local people, the threat of losing everything is very real.

Derek Hallet is one of those living on a landslide.

Ten years ago, half his garden fell into the sea.

Today, it's all but gone entirely,

leaving his home just metres from the edge.

We had a wonderful garden. We had a lovely lawn.

Steps going down.

Apples trees. Some beautiful Bramleys.

And now, you can see it's now quite a... Well, quite a mess.

Just below his garden,

a multi-million-pound sea defence scheme is under way.

And it's come just in time.

On 4th February, the storm hit hard.

I must be honest, if we hadn't had the new defences nearly finished,

I don't know if we'd be here. The place was rocking.

For two nights, it actually rocked.

My famous saying is I go to bed with my life jacket on,

but we actually blew them up those nights!

Cheers, my friend.

Derek's more than happy to put up with the noise

and disruption of the sea defence works.

I think we're extremely lucky. I think we've been spoilt.

Lyme Regis have had a lot of money spent on it lately

and I think we're very, very lucky.

Derek's house is on East Cliff,

but he has a farm on the other side of town, at West Cliff,

and here, it's a different story.

These cliff top fields were once level pasture.

But storm force seas have undermined them

and heavy rainfall has loosened the land.

They're slumping into the sea and are unusable.

It's completely all gone.

The bad weather, the gales and the torrential rain,

as you can see, it's just gone.

I'd say it's about 40 acres in total.

God knows how many acres we've actually lost.

There's a lot down on the beach. It's gone on underneath this.

It's sad.

There are no sea defences here and none planned.

Basically all comes down to money

and with all the flooding up in the Somerset Levels

and the East Coast, you know, everybody got to have their piece

of cake and there's only one cake and we can't have it all here, can we?

So, hopefully, they'll do something down below, but who knows?

But could a case be made for protecting

the west side of Lyme Regis too?

I'm taking a trip with local geologist

Richard Edmond to find out.

'This is the best way to see what's going on here.'

Richard, the scale of this is extraordinary.

-The story's there, isn't it?

-That's right.

This is East Cliff, so the east side of Lyme Regis,

and it's built on an ancient landslide,

which goes all the way up to the slope at the back there

and the concern is that as the sea nibbles away the base of

the cliff and we get these very extreme rainfall events,

those landslides could be reactivated and take away up to 160 houses,

the main road, the church, the churchyard, the football field,

so there's a huge amount of property and value at risk

and that's what allows the funding to come in place to do a scheme here.

In terms of the design of that wall, there,

-it's already been put to the test, hasn't it?

-It has.

It hasn't even been finished and yet, it's survived those big seas.

Now, we're heading over to West Cliff,

where Derek's fields are working their way down onto the beach.

There are fewer houses here, so it's harder to justify shoring it all up.

This is the coast performing naturally.

There's no justification to spend millions of pounds

of public funding on a field, or even on a single house.

And just economically and sustainably, it would

-be completely the wrong approach.

-As a geologist, do you think

this is actually a realistic way to deal with things -

throw money at the problem over there,

-let nature take its course here?

-Absolutely, it is.

And all I would say is it's going to get harder and harder in the future.

Eventually, Black Ven, on the east side of Lyme Regis,

is going to want to work its way towards the town.

And it's very hard to imagine what kind of sums of money

you'd need to even try to stop it.

So, poor Derek's field up there is disappearing into the sea

at quite a rate.

It is. It's a real irony. This coast is so beautiful because it's eroding.

-It's a product of erosion.

-Yeah.

-If it wasn't eroding, it wouldn't be the place that it is.

-Yeah.

And obviously, people want to live and enjoy

and be in these places, but it comes with an inherent risk.

Climate experts say the evidence suggests,

be it by the coast or inland, we'd better brace ourselves.

We're at a crossroads of ocean weather and continental weather and

polar weather and tropical weather and we're a very small island.

The rainfall is getting more intense.

There is evidence for that in the records.

We can see that and we can analyse that.

So at the very least,

we should start to prepare for more extremes of weather.

Not everyone sees a changing landscape as a bad thing.

People often say, "Oh, we're losing the coast."

No, you can't lose the coast.

Or, "You're sacrificing the coast." No, you can't sacrifice the coast.

What's happening is the coast is just in a slightly different place.

And that's not only natural, it's what makes it so beautiful

and so dynamic and so interesting.

Others believe our efforts to hold back the tide will prove futile.

How do you move a town like Lyme Regis back? You can't.

It's where it is and that's a problem that's going to face

communities all around the world.

But in the long-term, nature will win.

Many of those who choose a life by the sea seem determined to stay put.

No-one can say they haven't been warned.

Everyone knows that life on the coast is dynamic,

and yes, it can be dangerous, but that's all part of its seduction.

It might prove to be a fatal attraction,

but for some, it's worth the risk.