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Everything in the Rebuild Iowa Advisory Commission’s 45-day report makes perfect sense. In response to the weather-caused disasters of this summer, it recommends: helping and advising people; taking care of housing needs before cold weather sets in; helping small businesses get back on their feet; mapping the flood plains; making it easier for local governments and the state to help; expediting the flow of funds from the federal government; and providing resources to avoid health problems.

Wait a minute. Shouldn’t we be doing those things all the time?

As human beings, we have many good points. We usually wear clean clothes, we applaud even the worst public speakers, and we put up with Halloween for the sake of … well, we just do. Unfortunately, when it comes to getting big things done, we are disaster-based.

When times are good, or at least normal, we slack off more and more as the weeks go by. Eventually, we’re spending most of the day on YouTube and going home at 3 p.m. Then a disaster drops by, and suddenly we start to rack up accomplishments like a high school senior who’s desperate for a scholarship.

English writer Samuel Johnson said nothing focuses the human mind like a hanging, and he didn’t mean a hanging way off in some other part of the world. We hear the equivalent of a trap door opening when a tornado hits Parkersburg or a flood submerges downtown Cedar Rapids.

We might still wonder why so much stuff is built on such low-lying ground, and why we keep it there, flood after flood, but we acknowledge that our fellow citizens need help, and we help them.

This time, the commission made a fine attempt to learn from the experience. It held public sessions around the state to hear what citizens had to say.

According to a Web site summary of comments, people talked a lot about paying more attention to levees – again, nothing to argue with there. It’s baffling that the levee in the Birdland area of Des Moines wasn’t put in proper shape at some point in the 5,400 days between the Floods of 1993 and the 2008 reprise. There’s more to the job than piling up dirt, but not a lot more.

Iowans also suggested doing some dredging. They probably should stick to their dreams of decent levees. I’m no hydrologist, but I predict that we will see very little dredging of Iowa’s rivers. You can’t show off the results.

The citizenry said the state should make sure that residents of flood-prone areas can sell their homes and move to areas outside the flood plain. Sounds all right, although penalties for bad judgment are what make us appreciate good judgment. Unfortunately, civil engineers and city planners used flood plains as the sites of little baubles like Hilton Coliseum and Hancher Auditorium, not to mention Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls, the Quad Cities and so forth.

We started building cities by rivers long ago for the drinking water and the transportation. Now we’re stuck with them.

Folks at the forums begged for a one-stop-shop approach to bureaucracy, complaining that a given flood question could draw two different responses from the same office. Good luck with that.

They asked for early-warning systems. Not sure what more they want in the case of flood threat. Around here, floods sneak up like a garbage truck, not a kitten. But it certainly would be a step forward if every small town had a fully functional siren system to warn of approaching tornadoes.

Of course, that still leaves country residents on their own. This is a good example of why we’ll never be able to prepare for every calamity and keep every citizen safe.

It’s like the sailor who heard a weather reporter say that a powerful hurricane had turned away from the East Coast and was moving “safely out to sea.” “Hey,” the sailor said to the radio, “I’m out here.”