THIS week's big and sustained south-easterly swell has resumed the erosion at known coastal hot spots, just eight weeks after a massive late-May south swell brought hypnotic lines of perfect surf but gouged out huge amounts of sand in the process.
At Stockton, emergency sandbagging has been put to the test and further erosion is obvious in front of the caravan park.
At Jimmys Beach on the Hawks Nest side of Port Stephens, erosion again threatens the narrow tar strip of The Boulevarde, and ultimately the houses facing the water from the inland side of the road.
At Wamberal, north of Terrigal on the Central Coast, giant waves smashed their way through Stockton-style rock emplacements to leave a handful of homes teetering on the edge of a two-storey drop to the beach below.
Satellite records show ocean levels rising by more than three millimetres a year on average: unchecked, such increases would eventually create vast ocean encroachment.
At the same time, it is worth noting that Stockton, Jimmmys Beach and Wamberal have suffered for decades with erosion, and more so than the surrounding coast.
The situation at Stockton - and its linkage to harbour breakwalls and the artificially started beach of Nobbys (which appears to be accreting sand rather than losing it) is well known to Newcastle Herald readers.
Similarly, the Herald has reported years of debate over the erosion at Jimmys Beach, where piece-meal replenishment programs have kept a sort of see-sawing status quo, and hopes are held for a $4.1 million sand transfer pipeline, once MidCoast Council selects a tenderer to operate it.
At Wamberal, like Collaroy on Sydney's Northern Beaches, big swells have been threatening houses for decades.
A 1978 photo of Wamberal, showing a house collapsed into the surf at much the same spot now under threat, circulated on social media on Friday, to make that point.
Each situation is different, but all exist on the boundary between private property and the public purse: how far should we go, in other words, to hold back the forces of nature, especially when it's unlikely such sensitive areas would be approved for development today?
We can try to hold the line, but the results at all of these hot spots will be disturbingly predictable each time there's a substantial swell.
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