PREVENTION

A heavy rain had been falling as a man drove down a lonely road. As he rounded a curve, he saw an old farmer surveying the ruins of his barn. The driver stopped his car and asked what had happened. 

"Roof fell in," said the farmer. "Leaked so long it finally just rotted through." 

"Why in the world didn't you fix it before it got that bad?" asked the stranger. 

"Well, sir," replied the farmer, "it just seemed I never did get around to it. When the weather was good, there weren't no need for it, and when it rained, it was too wet to work on!" 

Our Daily Bread.

Cliff Carstens, on farming:

If the weeds are so big that I can recognize them from the tractor, I know I'm too late. You've got to get them before that.

The Cost of Not Putting a Finger in the Dike

For most of the last decade, Chicagoans who worked in the Loop, the booming downtown business district, could easily ignore the city's budget crisis; Washington's cutback of aid to cities didn't seem to hurt business. Last week, they learned one price of neglecting the underpinnings of all that economic growth. A quarter billion gallons of murky Chicago River water gushed into a 60-mile network of turn-of-the-century freight tunnels under the Loop and brought nearly all businesses to a soggy halt. It turned out that a top city official had known about the leak, but, acting for a cash-strapped government, had delayed repairs costing only about $50,000. The final cost of the damage could run higher than $1 billion. 

U.S. News & World Report, April 27, 1992.