... And more will be needed after Splash Point collapse

SOMERSET West and Taunton Council is set to spend an initial £740,000 on helping to make the walls of Watchet harbour safe.

The bulk of the money will go on repairing the marina wall alongside the East Quay, and more funding will have to be found in due course for a permanent repair to the sea wall at Splash Point, which was breached before Christmas.

The council’s executive will be asked on Wednesday to recommend that the full council adds £200,000 to the current year’s capital programme - £100,000 for design work on the marina wall and a similar amount on producing a solution to the Splash Point failure.

The remaining £540,000 would go into the 2020-21 capital programme to fund the marina wall repair.

The amount needed to repair the Splash Point wall will be dealt with later after design work has been completed.

The marina wall is divided into three sections and the repairs will be done to the central part.

In a report to both the scrutiny committee on Monday and the executive on Wednesday, the council’s localities manager Chris Hall says: “It is clear that the central part of the structure is nearing the end of its life and were there to be no maintenance then it will inevitably fail at some point in the future.”

Although the wall is not “at imminent risk of failure” it would benefit from maintenance, reinforcing and monitoring.

He says the central section exceeded the minimum safety factor at high tide but at low tide failed to meet minimum safety requirements.

“This means, in theory, that the wall should fail but, in practice, it has shown no signs of doing so.

“Due to the construction of this section, failure would most likely be seen by a bending of the sheet pile rather than a collapse.”

The report says this was the worst case scenario and that “the assumptions are predicting a situation which is worse than reality”.

But it was being recommended that this section should be reinforced, probably with sheet piling on the existing wall.

The northern section of the wall exceeded the minimum safety factor at high tide and for pedestrian and vehicle traffic at low tide, but failed for crane operations at low tide.

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