[hyperbovine]

The repeated self-comparisons with the Dutch, were, as the Dutch themselves apparently used to say, droll. I did a bike trip along the northern coast of the Netherlands recently. If you want to appreciate the level of concerted, society-wide effort needed to address flooding and storm surge, look no further than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oosterscheldekering. (Which is itself part of the even larger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Works.)

I had no idea whatsoever that this thing existed or what it was for until it simply hove into view one day while biking from town to town. It is a truly spectacular sight and worthy of the title of "8th Engineering Wonder of the World".

Compare the $billions and $billions and centuries, literally centuries, that the Dutch have invested in tackling this problem with, as the TFA puts it, some pumps the size of a large airedale. It drives home the point of how utterly fucked Miami, and the rest of the coastal world that is not the Netherlands, really is.