Prison threat for pensioner who put sand back on beach

Sand-blasted: Mr Bulmer's home and the road that separates him from the sea

Sand storm: Mr Bulmer says council rule is 'crazy'

A pensioner has been threatened with prison or a £50,000 fine if he takes windblown sand back to the beach where it came from.

Arthur Bulmer?s seafront garden became carpeted after a week of storms swept tons of sand from the beach across the road.

It seemed like common sense to shovel it into his wheelbarrow and take it back, load by load, to its rightful place.

But the local council did not share Mr Bulmer's idea of logic.

Doing that, they told him, would class as fly-tipping, for which the maximum penalty is a £50,000 fine or six months in jail.

Oh, and he would also have his wheelbarrow confiscated.

"I've always had problems with sand blowing into my garden but the gales this year have made it much worse," Mr Bulmer, 79, a retired bank manager, said.

"I asked the council if I could shovel it up and take it across the road and put it back on the beach. They said I could not do that because it constitutes fly-tipping.

"It is crazy. Windblown sand is of high quality - very fine and very clean and I'm sure my sand is cleaner than the sand on the beach which gets covered in dog muck."

The weather has been so bad over the past few months in St Annes, near Blackpool, that sand has been displaced right across the seafront.

It has covered roads and footpaths as well as private gardens. One car park has inherited a 20ft-high dune.

Council workmen have been slowly hauling it away, but will only do so from public areas, leaving householders to do their own clearing up.

Which was no easy task in the case of Mr Bulmer. Some seven tons of sand had blown into the garden of his £450,000 detached bungalow.

A spokesman for Fylde Borough Council made it clear that householders were responsible for their own property.

"The sand is actually part of the Queen?s Crown estate, which owns most of the foreshore around our coasts," he said.

"This year has seen an exceptional problem with wind-blown sand. We have been cleaning up since Christmas. But the council has no responsibility to clear sand or any other debris from private land.The owner must do this."

Dumping "anything" on to the beach from a private garden constituted flytipping, he said, and was a contravention of the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act. "It is a case of where do you draw the line."

The maximum penalty for fly-tipping is a £50,000 fine and six months imprisonment. Offenders can also have their vehicle - in this case a wheelbarrow - confiscated.

Mr Bulmer, a widower with four grandchildren, has now paid £500 for a private firm to take away the sand. But he is aware that a few nights of heavy wind would bring it all back. "It took two men seven hours to clear the sand from my front garden," he said.

"The sand is not my property. It has just invaded my garden. We want the local authority to show some common sense and help us do something about this problem.

"I can?t understand their logic. They say I can't return the sand from where it came from because it is contaminated once it has left the beach.

"But when their own workmen scoop it off the roads they put it back, contaminated or not. They told me to take it to the tip, but there was too much of it."

Don Moore, a campaigner for beach protection, said the council needed to do more to stop the sand blowing away, instead of threatening residents for putting it back.

"We need strong grass like Marram grass to be planted to hold back the sand.The council needs to take more steps with beach management."

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