What great news! After 85 days and millions of gallons of oil spilling into the waters off Louisiana’s coast, the flow has been stopped.

Everyone’s hopeful this or some similar “controlled” condition will last. Time will tell. Assuming it does, those who have been working tirelessly on the containment and recovery of the oil will be able to see light at the end of the tunnel. A final amount of oil will have been spilled and a final amount will eventually be recovered. You know they will not be the same number and they will not be close.

We as citizens should not get too concerned with the numbers because they are subjective at best and are nothing more than two data points in the grand scheme of acknowledging, assessing and accepting the fact America’s largest oil spill ever is likely coming to an end.

It may take a couple of years, but as of today, the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill is defined: It started on April 20 and stopped on July 15 with an estimated 184 million gallons of crude oil released into the Gulf of Mexico.

I’m fairly confident the media attention will shift rather rapidly to other events with some limited, ongoing coverage of BP processing claims, the reality that all the seafood in the area is not destroyed or, God forbid, a hiccup in the control of the release during the relief well operations.

I’m more concerned there will be no coverage of the opportunity our nation has to take the next steps toward improving our national preparedness for environmental emergencies through the legislative process in Congress.

It’s events like this catastrophic oil spill that provide the political energy for the outpouring of ideas in hundreds of pieces of proposed legislation from members of Congress, federal agencies, nonprofit entities, the oil industry and individual citizens.

The Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, one of America’s worst and most notorious environmental disasters, offered up the Oil Pollution Act of 1990. That legislation catapulted our national emergency preparedness infrastructure into the 21st century.

It changed almost every aspect of the preparedness process, including planning, equipment requirements, funding, command and control, expectations and requirements for training and exercising.

Since that spill was from a tank ship, the law included provisions addressing the technical design and operation of oil tankers and their crews to minimize future spills. The law also included provisions for research and technology funding controlled by the government. However, the funding to aggressively pursue innovative technology never materialized.

America needs industry leadership in managing and directing any research and development initiatives delivered from post-Deepwater Horizon legislation. Funding should be shared 75 percent industry and 25 percent government with the unit fee tied to barrels of oil moved by operating environment – vessel, pipeline, offshore and shore-side storage.

Secondly the federal government’s National Response Team needs to be involved with each industry’s operating environment in using those funds to build, buy and share specialized equipment and technology so it’s available to any company experiencing a catastrophic spill.

We have a new opportunity to make historic improvements in our national response posture. We need to keep the ideas alive and the dialogue productive.

Donohoe, co-founder of Memphis environmental firm Tioga Environmental Consultants, spent 24 years with the U.S. Coast Guard in their environmental protection program during which time he served as technical adviser in the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound.