When the winds whipped up by the St Jude storm hit southern England at the end of last month, there was one stretch of the English south coast that for the first time was not a flooding concern for the Environment Agency. The area of Medmerry near Selsey in West Sussex has increasingly been flooded in high seas and bad weather. But a few weeks ahead of the storm, in September, the Agency had opened up an 11om wide breach in the sea wall as one of the final steps in the creation of its latest managed realignment coastal flood management scheme. And instead of fighting to keep the sea back with bulldozers and shingle - 250,000t of it every year on average - the Agency could welcome the water to a defined area inland, and that way stop it threatening 350 properties, the coast road to 5,000 homes on Selsey Bill and the local sewage treatment works.
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