Coastal erosion from North Sea winds has to topple the 120-year-old Rubjerg Knude lighthouse. However, the Danes have come up with a simple solution. Move the whole thing inline by 70m on skates.
The lighthouse weighs in at 720-tonnes. However, the operation to lift it up and move it 70m inland took local builder Kjeld Petersen only a few hours.
Speaking to the BBC Kjeld explained that while they “could not go faster than 12m an hour because they needed to calibrate the hydraulics. It’s in sand and you need to ensure it runs well on the two rails,” explained Mette Ring, from the local authority”
While the operation itself was fast planning it has taken 10 weeks.
The team behind the move, Petersen and a local engineering, used beams that were first inserted into the base of the lighthouse, they then raised the structure onto parallel rails and moved it away from the sea.
Rubjerg Knude is a popular danish tourist attraction. The lighthouse attracts around a quarter of a million people a year to the sand dunes of the island of North Jutland which is why the local authority, with government funding of 5m Danish Kroner (£0.6m), decided invest in the operation to move it inland.
It is now thought that the lighthouse will be safe from coastal erosion for the next 40-years.
