A heartbroken mum fears her cliff-top home may fall into the sea by Christmas - after 26ft (8m) of land was swept away in just a MONTH.
Nicola Bayless’s three-bed semi in Happisburgh is now less than 50ft (15m) from the cliff after storms Babet and Ciaran ravaged the Norfolk coast in the autumn.
And she worries her family’s £375,000 property may be gone by the end of December as the village teeters on the edge.
Nicola, 48, said: “We haven’t even got into winter, but as we’ve lost that much, we could be forced to leave in springtime or even before Christmas. It’s frightening.”
Nicola Bayless’s three-bed semi in Happisburgh is now less than 50ft (15m) from the cliff after storms Babet and Ciaran ravaged the Norfolk coast in the autumn.
And she worries her family’s £375,000 property may be gone by the end of December as the village teeters on the edge.
Nicola, 48, said: “We haven’t even got into winter, but as we’ve lost that much, we could be forced to leave in springtime or even before Christmas. It’s frightening.”
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NewsTranscript
00:00 I'm Nicola Bayliss and I've lived in Hayesborough since 2004. I used to holiday down here as
00:15 a child as well in the 90s. Basically since then we've lost a lot of cliff and most of
00:26 the road as you can see that's ending here has disappeared and all the houses and I'm
00:34 next and it doesn't look like I've got that much longer. In the last month there's been
00:44 about 6 metres gone so it's pretty crazy how quickly things are happening. 2012 the Beasts
01:07 from the East we had a massive lot go when we had the high storms then and now it seems
01:18 to be every time we get a high tide it's batten down the hatches and check what's happening.
01:24 We've had heavy rains and the winds just whips up the waves and just hits the cliffs so it
01:33 is happening more. The electrical company has come out today to check the power cables
01:51 because the power line here is going to be going in very soon. It's not far from the
01:57 edge of the cliff so lots of other utilities like water board as well they've had to reroute
02:05 water to the lighthouse to the cottages there too so that's had to be moved because all
02:11 the water pipes were visible a little while ago. So we've been, Hayesborough's always
02:23 been battling against being able to get new revetments and new sea defences in here but
02:31 that's been told that we can't have it renewed, they're leaving it alone. We have had rocks
02:39 put in that the community and local council raised money for, they were placed down there.
02:47 They're not exactly very efficient, they do a little bit of slowing up but the wooden
02:54 revetments that we had would have been much better. They would have slowed a lot of this
03:00 down because it did maintain the line for a long time and it's just ever since this
03:06 has all been destroyed you can see all the bits that were left over there, they're basically
03:14 just sticking up now but they were protecting the cliff and that's where the cliff was just
03:21 before those wooden bits so that's how much has gone in the past 20 years.
03:27 [sound of water]
03:37 [sound of birds]