Drowning in a deadly duo

The Lake Delhi Dam failed in eastern Iowa yesterday flooding nearby areas and forcing evacuations along the Maquoketa River. Apparently the area had been suffering from torrential rains the past few days causing the roads on either side of the damn to give out, weakening the structure which eventually failed.
I feel as if I get more and more cases of deja vu these days...is it just me?
Disaster weather, structures destroyed, people misplaced. It smacks of two evils this country excels at ignoring: global warming and a broken infrastructure. The two on their own are bad enough but together they form a deadly duo that continuously bashes this country with unforgiving wrath.
The same argument was used in New Orleans: well, the damn isn't made to withstand this kind of weather...well then why the fuck don't you make it so it is? If you can retrofit every other building in the LA area to withstand an 8.5 earthquake, you can retrofit the only thing standing between a city and oblivion. That's not to say that LA isn't suffering from a dying infrastructure. A friend of mine sarcastically scoffed that LA was a beacon of modern city life...70 years ago. Look at the roads. It's almost like playing a video game trying to dart inbetween pot holes and cracks. In other countries where public transit is timely and efficient, I waited for a bus for over an hour the other day, only to have a bus finally show up, over crowded and looking like its prime had come at the same time as Strom Thurmonds (if he ever had one).
Yet we still fluff our feathers and stick our obese chests out, chanting we're the best, we're the best. The Delhi dam isn't the last of these catastrophes to come. According to Gov. Culver, it was luckily mostly uninhabited farm land that was affected by the flood, but how often can we count ourselves lucky? How often can we watch the news and refuse to see the read thread running through these disaster stories? Whether we choose to accept it or not, the earth will shift and our golden age foundation will shift with it, moving whatever or whoever sits in its path. Can our viewpoints shift ahead of that curve?