Horror New Year’s Eve cliff collapse at Bells Beach kills one, injures three

Four hit by falling debris. Three suffered minor injuries, the unnamed man died in a rescue chopper en route to hospital in Melbourne. 

A twenty-eight-year-old man is dead after a cliff collapsed pouring debris onto a group of six at Southside, there on the southern side of the Bells Beach headland one hundred clicks from Melbourne.

The accident happened around 2:15 when the group was showered by debris falling from the eroding hundred-foot high bluff above ‘em.

Four were hit. Three suffered minor injuries, the unnamed man died in a rescue chopper en route to hospital in Melbourne. 

Anyone with a long memory will recall a similar accident in 1996 when five adults and four kids were killed while sheltering from shitty weather under a limestone overhang during a surf contest at Huzza’s, across the bay from North Point in Western Australia’s south-west. 

If you’ve ever surfed South Point y’might’ve seen the memorial, built above the collapse site. 

Skye Thompson was twelve when her Dad, the noted surf coach Lindsay, waved goodbye before the cliff collapsed.

“I had just finished surfing and was about to leave the beach and that’s when the cliff actually fell,” she told ABC news at the twenty-fifth memorial in September. “I was standing right alongside it and saying goodbye to my friends and my father. That’s a difficult memory.”