Snark aside, this is actual advice in Crisis Engineering by Nitze, Weaver, and Dickerson, and largely matches my experiences as well. You can harp on and on and on at upper management about why budget or attention needs to be allocated to take care of something before it blows up into a much bigger problem, but they'll never move on it -- until it actually does blow up, and then suddenly you've got nearly a blank check to do whatever's necessary to make sure it never happens again.

If you don't take full advantage of that, you're missing out on possibly your only opportunity ever to fix whatever's needed fixing for years.