Press Release - 11/7/00

"We may not be fighting on the beaches, but we are certainly fighting for the beaches", said Malcolm Ridge, Chairman of The Gower Society at the launch of a new web-site. gower-sos.com - (sos standing for Save Our Sands) - is the latest tool in the fight by residents and visitors of Gower who have come together to fight plans to increase dredging from the Helwick, a sand-bank, just a mile off-shore from some of the most spectacular beaches in south Wales.

Gower is the first designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the whole of the UK, but dredging threatens not only its beauty and its wildlife - its fish and birds - but its tourist-based economy.

Since the Llanelli Sand Dredging Company began extracting sand nearly a decade ago, locals have witnessed a steady fall in the level of sand on a number of the beaches until Port Eynon Bay, for example, is stripped to rock level for more than half its area.

There is, as yet, no direct, irrefutable evidence, of a causal link between dredging and beach erosion (just as, for years, no-one could absolutely prove the link between smoking and cancer), but if we wait until it is proven it will be too late. Once the sand has gone, it has gone forever.

Local groups - from fishermen, to surfers to bird-watchers, to conservation societies and Women's Institutes - have joined together to persuade the National Assembly of Wales to refuse the Company's application to double the amount of sand they take from 150,000 to 300,000 tons each year.

30% of sand extracted from the UK is exported to Europe - to Gower people, its seems not so much a case of selling the family silver, as stealing the family gold; the golden beaches that belong to posterity, not to a small off-shoot of a Dutch company.

Editors note

Gower, a peninsula west of Swansea in south Wales, was designated an AONB in 1956.

Most of its southern coastline (55 hectares) is a designated Heritage Coast; it has four national nature reserves (including a RAMSAR site in the Burry Estuary), seventeen other nature reserves and 27 Sites of Special Scientific Interest.

The Llanelli Sand Dredging Company has been dredging Helwick Bank since 1992, and has now applied for a new licence to increase to 3000,000 tons per year. The company is part of the Westminster group, which itself is owned by a Dutch company.

The National Assembly for Wales will discuss the issue briefly on12.7.00 and will make the final decision early in the autumn.