Dunedin City Council 3 Waters manager Tom Dyer, speaking at yesterday's infrastructure networks and services committee meeting, said a "reasonably significant'' review of Ocean Beach was getting under way.
The project would include working with consultants and the community to consider issues needing to be tackled across Ocean Beach, which stretches from St Clair to Lawyers Head.
The project was launched earlier this year and would include considering what to do with the old landfill under Kettle Park, he confirmed.
While the review had not been prompted by the unfolding "eco-disaster'' of rubbish from an old landfill contaminating West Coast beaches, events there would inform the approach in Dunedin, he said.
It was hoped a report with options for the entire area would be ready for consideration by councillors by the end of 2020, he said.
In the meantime, ongoing monitoring and maintenance of the area was continuing, and there were no signs the old landfill was at imminent risk of being exposed by large swells hitting the coast, he said.
"If an event were to occur, we have a whole bunch of options for managing that,'' he told
the meeting.
"So you have a plan?'' Cr Andrew Whiley asked him.
"A loose plan, yeah,'' he responded.
Mr Dyer said after the meeting the review was looking at the broad plan for Ocean Beach, from managing the sea wall and geotubes protecting the area to the landfill and other issues.
Its findings would help councillors decide how best to invest in the area in future, he said.
It was "way too early'' to say what options were likely to protect the old landfill, but excavating the area was among those to be considered, he said.
"It could be anything from dune changes to hard infrastructure and anything in between.
"The whole idea is we look at everything really broadly and then start to narrow down options later on.''
In April, torrential rain in Westland exposed an old Fox Glacier landfill on the edge of the Fox River, depositing rubbish along a 100km stretch of previously pristine coastline and triggering a major clean-up.
Since then, the Otago Regional Council has confirmed there were more than 250 historic closed landfill sites across Otago, including more than 50 in Dunedin.
Of those found, 27 were within 200m of the coastline and 63 within 20m of a waterway, including the one under Kettle Park.
The landfill there operated from the early 1900s until it was capped and largely forgotten about in the 1940s.
It reemerged in 2007, when significant coastal erosion exposed the toe of the landfill, leading to tests which found traces of arsenic, asbestos and other industrial chemicals in nearby sand dunes.
The council responded in 2010 by introducing the Ocean Beach management plan, including interim steps to monitor the area and defend it against further erosion.
It also outlined plans for multimillion-dollar options - from a buried backstop wall to a clean-up and managed retreat - if they were required.
Mr Dyer said yesterday any new options developed as part of the latest review would not be rushed, as the council wanted to be "quite methodical''.
"We're taking the approach that if you change one thing at one end of the beach, it will inevitably have an impact at the other end.
"We just want to make sure that anything that we do do, the impacts on the beach further down ... are all taken into account.''
