“A group says their tiny community in eastern Nova Scotia and its livelihood are being placed at risk because a 70-year-old seawall that wards off the Atlantic Ocean is on the verge of collapse,” writes the Huffington Post.
“Local resident Tim Menk said finding the money to repair the structure that protects the 300-year-old village of Gabarus in Cape Breton has become a four-year battle that’s mired in the murky details of who owns the seawall.
“At stake for Gabarus is its fishing industry, road access to the village and several private homes, said Menk, an organizer with Friends of Gabarus.
” ‘We believe … it could be, as we say, one wave away from failure.’ ” Read more.
It’s the sort of thing that worries everyone who lives or works near the sea. When I was a child, storms that ripped neighbors’ Fire Island houses out to sea made a big impression on me. You learn respect for waves.
Suzanne's Mom's Blog 
Yikes, what a situation. Sadly these sorts of situations arise fairly frequently. Even when/if ownership can be established, that may not solve the problem: to wit, in our town, there’s a crumbling dam that’s on property acquired a few years back by the town land trust. They are required to either repair it or get rid of it, but they don’t have the funds to do either thing.
I bet people would donate to a cause like the seawall–it just takes someone to be willing to collect the funds. I guess, too, though, the town would have to hire engineers and things… yeah, it’s a big job.
Lately it seems like everyone and his brother is using Kickstarter to raise money. Maybe the Gabarus folks will do that, or the people in your town. Curiously, when we tried to sell my mother’s house in the early 1990s, it took more than a year. One reason was that it had a waterfall/dam that looked iffy and NY state has a lot of rules about renovations or anything done that close to a river. This past year when Irene caused serious floods in the county and other dams failed, my cousin told me that my mother’s dam did just fine. Go figure.