One week after the National Marine Fisheries Service announced an economically devastating 80 percent cut in the Gulf of Maine cod harvest, the Massachusetts congressional delegation has responded with a request for $100 million in disaster relief for New England fishermen.

The quick response is commendable and the request is altogether reasonable. The situation is in every sense a disaster, just like a flood, a tornado or a hurricane. There is, however, one difference — this disaster is largely human in origin, it is the result of more than 20 years of misguided and haphazard politics and federal fisheries policies.

It started with the 1976 Magnuson Fisheries Act, in which Congress subsidized the entry into the fishing industry of investors with no stake in the long-term health of the ocean. As overfishing developed, species by species, federal regulators reacted with measures utterly contrary to the advice of real fishermen. The current status of the Gulf of Maine is but the latest example — fishermen warned that the closure of depleted Georges Bank in 1994 merely would force displaced boats into the gulf unless those offshore fishermen were offered a support system that would allow then to ride out the rebuilding period. No support was offered, the gulf was swamped, the cod are gone.

The Massachusetts initiative, led by Sen. Edward Kennedy, will make $100 million available to allow fishermen, their families and their communities to survive the gulf closure; it will help ensure there is a fishing fleet left when the cod rebound. It will offer living assistance, low-cost health insurance, refinancing for vessels and shoreside facilities, job training and funds to boost economic development in hard-hit communities. Most importantly, it is targeted specifically at the small-boat inshore fishermen of Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, those who cannot head far out to sea to evade the closed areas.

That alone — the shift in focus from the large corporate fleet to the family-based owner/operator — is a remarkable and absolutely necessary change. Long overdue.

NMFS is on board the proposal and already has prepared a request to have the Department of Commerce declare the cod situation a disaster worthy of emergency funding. If Commerce and the Office of Budget and Management approve, the measure will go directly to the Senate for a vote. It’s that quick and easy.

So quick and easy, in fact, one has to wonder if anyone in the New England congressional delegation hears “cod” and thinks “ice storm.” You know, the ice storm that had the region shivering in the dark for weeks last winter, that devastated electric utilities and that had, once upon a time, a $60-million disaster-relief appropriation. The appropriation that, despite the clear intent of Congress, was whittled down by the Department of Housing and Urban Development last month to virtually nothing, leaving electricity ratepayers with the bill.

Although the storm itself was an act of nature, the hardship that lingers is, like the cod crisis, clearly man-made.