THE SHIFTING SANDS OF SOMERTON BEACH ... PART 2... An update... March 18th 2021

 SOMERTON BEACH...
The 1970s?

....It is thought that the image of the beach scene above may have come from the Littlemore Interview days around 1976. Judging by the models of the cars that is certainly a possibility.

What's significant about this image is the number of steps. There are two flights and the count is 12 concrete steps in the upper flight and 11 visible steps in the lower flight, all up 23 steps. This next piece of information is most important, the average height for s step is approximately 7 inches. or .18 of a meter. From this image, we can calculate the height/distance from the road surface to the beach floor. I will add another step making it 24 steps accounting for one more at the base of the lower flight which is out of camera shot. (Corrected, the upper flight count is 16 steps)

On that basis, the distance/height from the beach floor to the road surface would be 24 X .18 meter = 4.26 meters.

 Now let's move to the next image:

In this image, we can make out 15 steps in the upper flight and 5 in the lower flight, 20 steps in total with 7 inches being the approximate height of each which equates to 140 inches or 3.55 meters distance/height from the beach floor to the road surface.

THE STEPS TODAY

I am actually waiting for some pics but I am told that there is one flight of 16 steps from the road down to the beach floor. On that basis and given the height of 7 inches for each step, we have 112 inches or 2.85 meters from the beach floor to the road surface.

In the next post, I will be introducing the results of an analysis carried out by an expert witness. He will be producing evidence that will give us a snapshot in time of the action of the tide on the night of 30th November and 1st December 1948. 

You can see from the two images that we have a variable in play, our witness refers to it as morphology, the way in which beaches can shift over time, seasonally and annually and sometimes with the aid of human intervention. The sandy beaches may shift significantly but the tides less so. 

How does that impact the case? Put simply, the greater the distance from the beach floor to the road surface, the further up the beach the high tide will flow. Our focus is on the 3.55-meter distance from the road surface to the beach floor as it was on December 1st, 1948, we need to match that with the known tide action on that date and at high tide, 4.30 a.m.

The tide tables used to forecast tide heights in and around Adelaide were based on the measurements at Port Adelaide it seems, meaning that whilst each beach would have a different tide height that wasn't reflected on the newspaper forecasts of the day. An example, our expert witness tells me that during the last high tide over the past weekend, at a beach just 100 meters North of Somerton Beach, the tide reached right up to the rock sea wall. Does that mean that the same would apply for Somerton Beach? Not necessarily but we hope to see that in the next post.

Where are these posts heading? 

If we can show that the high tide that occurred around 4.30 am on 1st December 1948, reached up to the low sea wall, then in the light of the various witness statements at the inquest, it would prove beyond any doubt that the Somerton Man, whose time of death was 2 am that morning, must have been placed on the beach after the high tide and before the strappers and John Lyons found him deceased and leaning against the wall. In turn that would mean that someone put him there and, given his size and build, it was very probably two people.

UPDATED 18th March 2021

1. On comparing the upper flight of steps, they appear to be the same as those in the first image on this page. The exception is what is very probably a new set of handrails, So we have 16 steps at 7 inches in the upper flight.

2. There is a small but noticeable drop from the base of the first flight to the start of the second flight, allow a further 125 mm.

3. Further research tells us that the current Australian Standards for step heights vary between 130 mm up to 220 mm. The US average step height via normal search states that the average height per step is 7.5 inches.

The issue that we face is that, if the average step height is correct then we could say that the tide came all the way up to the base of the low sea wall. But if it's not, whilst still possible, it may not make the wall or it would be a line ball situation. The hunt is on for more information about these particular steps.

JS agreed that the vehicles in the second image look earlier than the 70s, a proviso is that it was just happenstance that they were in shot and other later model vehicles were just not around.

PB The April 48 storm (The Barcoo incident) certainly would have affected the level of the sands on the SA beaches which may account for the higher level of sand at Somerton, it is not known whether any dredging or pumping took place between April and November 1948 at the location. In essence, though, we are only concerned with the relative measurements of steps and road to beach floor measurement at the time. There may be some mentions on Trove as indeed there may be mentions of any replacement and repair work to the steps. Here's an example of another severe weather event that caused significant damage :https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/11139402