Basically—I don't know whether you can see it or not—the front of the wharf, which was wood, fell off. The bolts let go; it just fell into the water. But when it was falling into the water, the pieces that were to replace it were sitting 35 feet away from it, paid for but never installed.
The sad part of it is that those pieces are still sitting there paid for but never installed. The repair work that is taking place right now looks lovely, but when they go to put the sheathing and the whalers back on, the repair job they have just done will all have to be torn back out.
Plus, if I were a betting man, I would bet that what they just did, and what I saw yesterday, won't be there next spring if we get one good tidal surge this winter. It will rip that rock out of there and put it in the harbour.
So as I said, we have very much a landlord-tenant agreement. As the tenant, we do our best to keep the grass cut, everything painted up pretty, and the whole nine yards. But the rooves are leaking and the basements are crumbling. If we don't stop putting band-aids on, and if we don't come up with more funding, all of the infrastructure on Prince Edward Island.... Most of it was built in the sixties and the seventies. There was a gap there, when there was not a whole lot done, and it's all coming down, and all coming down at once.
The scariest part, from where I sit as a harbour manager, is that I think back to Hurricane Juan, and I think back to the tidal surge we had on December 27, 2004, and I think of what would happen if we got Hurricane Juan times two.
But if the conditions were a little different than they were, and if the major part of that surge were on the north shore of P.E.I., where we have extreme problems with infill and siltation, the same as our colleagues in the Madeleine Islands, I'd hesitate to think what would happen on P.E.I. I would be very surprised if we were not to see, the next morning, a giant pile of toothpicks from North Lake to Tignish. All of the structures are in the same shape. They are not good.
We need to start taking care of some of these structures now. If we don't.... A little bit of money—I'm not talking about $100 but about $20,000 and $30,000—will save you $100,000 in the long run.