The average American has a pretty fair notion of what constitutes an emergency. Most often it has something to do with nature run amok, with shivering in the dark, with water up to the eyebrows, with buildings reduced to rubble. Lives are lost or at least in peril.

The United States Congress has a definition that’s considerably more liberal — generous might be the better word. If blizzards, tornadoes and military interventions can be crises, why not the 2002 Winter Olympics, Lake Champlain or Hawaii’s bus system?

Yes, this year’s version of the emergency spending bill now moving through Congress does include money to help the hapless recover from tough breaks. New England’s ice storms have not been forgotten, nor have the South’s floods, the Midwest’s twisters or the troops in the Persian Gulf.

Nor have the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. These games, long on the calendar of every skier, luger and ice dancer on the planet, apparently just came to the attention of the Senate. The emergency bill includes $64 million for a light-rail connector between event sites and $1.9 million for unspecified “transportation requirements.” You know how these regularly scheduled quadrennial events can catch one unawares.

Then there’s $33 million for emergency water projects in Mississippi, which, while it faces no imminent water emergency, is home to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott. Don’t forget the $3 million to study Hawaii’s crisis-striken mass transit system. It is not for nothing that Sen. Daniel Inouye is widely regarded as the Senate’s reigning prince of pork.

Best of all, though, is the Lake Champlain affair. Seems Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy snuck into a unrelated bill a few weeks ago an amendment designating that body of water as the sixth Great Lake. The Midwest objected mightily: Champlain is a nice lake, it’s a pretty lake, but it simply is not Great.

But it turns out Leahy wasn’t trying to compare his pleasant little puddle with Michigan or Superior. He was just after the Sea Grant money available to the Big Five for research. So this emergency bill includes a compromise — Vermont withdraws the Great Lakes designation but still gets a cut of the money. And, Leahy chortled, his state got a lot of free publicity to boot.

This charade is nothing new. It is, in fact, a long-standing tradition that Congress never appropriates anything close to the money that will be needed for disaster relief so it will have a predictable supply of emergency bills in which to bury goodies for the home state.

It’s also a long-standing tradition — part of the skit, actually — that a few senators will rise to complain. This time, it was Sen. Phil Gramm’s turn to observe that the whole thing is “rather silly.”

Gramm then proposed requiring Congress to budget for disaster relief the same way it budgets for everything else. The proposal was rejected 76-24. And another emergency was averted.