Dear Congress, When Will You Ever Learn?

On July 20, 1969, the engineers in Mission Control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas breathed a collective sigh of relief combined with exuberant joy at 1618 that afternoon when Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong made the following transmission:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.“

Like NASA’s Eagle, the Lunar Module moon landing spacecraft of so many years ago, Hurricane Ida — a category 4 storm with devastating 150mph winds, catastrophic storm surge, and life-threatening flooding combined with widespread power outages, and more destruction yet to be discovered — has landed, exactly 16 years to the day that Hurricane Katrina devastated the Pelican State.

And like a salmon returning to its spawning spot, Ida came ashore at the exact same location as Katrina – New Orleans.

But with this landing, there is no joy in Mudville. There is no collective sigh of relief. There’s only Heartache v2.0, and even more tragically, with apparently little-to-no lessons learned.

Now, as our nation is on the precipice of some modicum of advancement, with massive spending on sorely-needed national infrastructure, both hard and soft, there seems to be absolutely no discussion of amelioration of either storm damage, or other environmental disaster associated with global climate change.

And sadly, there’s been no discussion of purchasing, designing, or creating a fleet of aerial supertankers to extinguish forest fires which have occurred with regular and increasing frequency in the west.

It’s not as if it can’t be done, for the Dutch embarked upon such a plan following a particularly disastrous North Sea Storm the night of Saturday, January 31 – Sunday, February 1, 1953 in which flooding over 18 feet above mean sea level devastated the Netherlands, wreaking death and destruction
• flooding 9% of total Dutch farmland,
• drowning over