The Sea Wall

The scheme is a one-point-four-kilometre sea defence and it will work.

This needs establishing first because every public conversation about it starts somewhere else. The modelling has been done three times by two separate consultancies and reviewed by the Environment Agency, and the answer is not in doubt: the wall, built as designed, reduces the one-in-two-hundred-year flood risk for the town from severe to negligible for the design life.

It costs forty-one million pounds. It is funded. It has planning consent.

The problem is the eastern end.

The eastern end

The alignment runs along the front, turns inland at the old boatyard, and rejoins the natural high ground four hundred metres later.

That turn leaves eleven properties on the seaward side.

They are on Ness Row. Nine are houses, one is a chandlery that has been a chandlery since 1902, and one is the sailing club.

Outside the wall means outside. It does not mean less protected; it means that when the wall works, the water that would have gone into the town goes somewhere, and where it goes is Ness Row.

Why the alignment is what it is

Because of the ground.

The natural line — the one that would take in Ness Row — crosses about two hundred metres of made ground over an old creek channel, and the piling required to found a wall in that material adds, in the 2019 costing, somewhere between eleven and fourteen million pounds.

That is not a rounding error. It is a third of the scheme.

The 2019 options appraisal considered it, costed it, and did not recommend it, on a benefit-cost ratio that came out below the threshold at which the scheme could be funded at all.

Not below the threshold for that section. Below the threshold for the whole thing.

What that means and what nobody will say plainly

If you include Ness Row, the scheme does not get built.

Not the eastern end — the scheme. Four thousand properties.

Dr Farrah Bright

She is the lead engineer and she has been on this since 2018 and she has done, by her own count, forty-one public meetings.

She is very good at them, which is a strange thing to be good at.

Her rule is that she will not say the phrase "difficult decisions" and she will not use the passive voice, and she will answer the question that was asked.

At the meeting in March a woman from Ness Row asked her, directly: "Did you draw the line?"

And Farrah said: "I drew the line."

There was a noise in the room.

She said: "I want to be clear because people keep telling you a committee did it. A committee approved it. I drew it. If you want to be angry with somebody, the somebody is me and I'm here every Tuesday."

The eleven

Farrah has met all eleven households. Not at meetings — at their kitchen tables, over two years, at their invitation or hers.

Four have accepted the compensation and relocation package and have gone or are going.

Three are fighting and have a solicitor and a campaign and a very good social media presence, and Farrah has never once criticised them for it publicly or privately and has told her own team that anyone who does can find another project.

Two are elderly and are not fighting and are not moving and have told her, in different words, that they will take their chances.

The chandlery is fighting.

The sailing club has, remarkably, voted to support the scheme, on the grounds that four thousand houses is four thousand houses, and the vote was fifty-one to nine, and Farrah has not been able to think about it without difficulty since.

The thing she cannot resolve

The modelling gives Ness Row a fifteen per cent annual probability of significant inundation after the wall is built, up from about four per cent now.

The wall makes it worse for them. Measurably, calculably worse.

That is not a side effect of the scheme; it is the scheme working. Water that is kept out of one place goes into another and there is no version of coastal defence in which this is not true, and every engineer knows it, and it is almost never said in a public meeting because it sounds like an admission of something.

Farrah says it in every public meeting.

She has been advised four times to stop.

What she has actually achieved

Not the alignment. The alignment is the alignment.

What she has got, over six years, by being extremely difficult inside her own organisation in a way that has cost her professionally:

An uplift on the compensation package that took eighteen months and a formal dispute.

A commitment, in writing, to a property-level resilience scheme for the two who are staying — flood doors, raised electrics, a pumped sump — which is not standard and which she obtained by threatening to resign in a meeting and meaning it.

And a monitoring station on Ness Row, funded for twenty-five years, which produces data nobody has asked for and which exists because if the modelling turns out to be wrong she wants somebody in 2040 to be able to prove it.

Construction

It starts in September.

The eastern end is phase three, which is 2027, which means the two who are staying have three more winters before the wall changes anything.

Farrah has told them that. She tells them everything; it is the only thing she has left to give them.

Mrs Adeyemi at number 4, who is eighty and who is staying, asked her in February whether she would still be on the project in 2027.

Farrah said she did not know.

Mrs Adeyemi said: "Try."