Hurricane Irene did not do as much damage as had been feared in New York City, but it brought much more human and environmental trauma two hundred miles or so to the north in Vermont.

The state is dealing with a second – and more damaging – round of historic flooding only a few months after Lake Champlain reached record levels in the spring. Three people were killed in the state due to the storm’s effects, and at least one more is missing.

Vermont’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure were battered as well. Several of the state’s covered bridges were damaged or washed away despite having stood for a century or more. At one point it seemed likely that water would have to be released from the Marshfield reservoir in order to save it, even at the risk of adding to flooding downstream. Although hundreds of households downstream from the dam were evacuated, the release of water did not prove necessary as floods crested.

“The scope of this disaster is unprecedented in modern Vermont history,” Vermont Transportation Secretary Brian Searles said.

On its own, the flooding of the last few days would have been a dire warning about how ill prepared the infrastructure in the state – and the region – is for sudden and violent rainfall, the kind we can expect to come along with climate change. But the devastation of tropical storm Irene was the second time this year that Vermonters have seen their wastewater treatment, stream banks, roads and bridges tested to the limits.

But despite these and other clear indications that our public infrastructure is not ready for weather that is likely to be wetter and more extreme we don’t seem to be able to cut spending on building and improving that infrastructure fast enough to satisfy national leaders.

And set aside for a moment the kind of innovative approaches we need so badly now such as green development techniques to handle polluted runoff from parking lots and roofs, better sewer projects with the capacity and technology to deal with higher water volumes and modern water management on farms. Our public spending on infrastructure projects of a more traditional kind has declined since the 1960s until now we invest half as much (as a function of GDP) as the Europeans, according to The Economist.

That historical decline in infrastructure spending has left those public projects we own in common at the weakest they have been in more than a generation, just when their strength will be needed to protect our homes, businesses and our lives. And that has happened just when we should instead be gaining the jobs and economic benefits of building the kind of modern projects needed to prevent personal, financial and environmental destruction from an increasingly violent climate we have brought on ourselves.