>it will be more water on a hillside than many of those hillsides can bear
A good example was the Oso mudslide. Nearby Darrington gets 80 inches a year. (Twice as much as Seattle!) March 2014, a storm drops 3 to 5 inches on soil saturated by six months of rain, and a hill lets go. Killed 43 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide
Article: "It already has happened in 1862, and it probably has happened about five times per millennium before that. On human time scales, 100 or 200 years sounds like a long time. But these are fairly regular occurrences."
Wikipedia on 1862 flood: "The event dumped an equivalent of 10 feet (3.0 m) of rainfall in California, in the form of rain and snow, over a period of 43 days."
Again, that was a reaction to something that already happened. Are there any examples of elected officials forcing folks to leave an area well before something bad happens?
> It looks like the Twin Cities (MSP) have a large amount of flooding given how backed up the work crews and insurance adjusters are.
I'm from ND originally and remember that flood, and yeah, it floods here in the cities a lot. This was more due to the super: zomg cold+snow, to... zomg its 40F and the entire streets a river cause nobody cleans out the drains in the fall prior to winter so that thaws are ok.
I'll just say in St Paul, rapid thaws means almost everyones basements flood. Even on the hills, its insane how easily it happens.
Indeed. Have you ever seen meteorologists appealing to raindrops? Have you ever seen a hydrologist counting water in fraction of CCs? A flood management system where individual droplets mattered?
No, a flood is a bulk event. It's managed like a system, using means with leverage over whole flows. Measurement starts with cubic meters. Nobody gives a damn about single raindrops, they're immaterial.
Same applies here. Focusing on regular individuals, and trying to get them to change their life style one by one, against the gradient of economic incentives controlling all of our lives, is like trying to pluck individual raindrops from rushing flood water. It's insane to even try. The answer is in redirecting the water stream; the droplets sort themselves out.
> This is why the problem will never be dealt with.
No, the problem will never be dealt with for as long as we focus on attempts to brow-beat everyone into self-sacrifice - to which people naturally react by ignoring the beating and resenting the beaters.
> Over in Germany, where they had massive flooding due to a ton of rain in a short period, everything about it is pinned on climate change, to the exclusion of discussing any other problems that can lead to disaster.
Germany has had "once in century" floods every decade for a while now. It's a densely populated country, meaning people can't just move somewhere else and there are not large swaths of unpopulated/unused lands that could be repurposed for massive flood control systems.
It's also not like we are talking about towns that have been built recently in risk-areas, we are talking about towns that have been in those places for centuries, sometimes over a millennia, which is a testament to how out of the ordinary these floods are.
> There's a small town here where every house is within a flood zone off the river and they were underwater for about a week a couple years ago. Built right back up and now there's 2 or 3 new housing developments going in.
Yeah we got the same shit in Ahrtal, Germany. The government decided to do nothing and so, predictably, three years after the last flood, a few weeks ago the next flood came - way smaller than the 2021 flood, but still decently destructive.
IMHO, after devastating flood events governments should declare the affected area uninhabitable, insurances and governments pay out fair market value, and the land is then flattened and condemned for future settlement. There is just no way that with the escalating severity due to climate change this land will ever be safe from flooding again.
>Recently my area was very flooded, all govt resources were diverted to the larger population areas including our local volunteer firefighters etc. to an extent that they even locked their doors and were uncontactable.
Fraser Valley?
That episode made me realize just how little we can depend on the government in a real disaster. If a little bit of rain generates such a clusterfuck, what will the Big One do to us?
As you mention water seeping into the basement is one common issue but even without that there are a few more.
EX: Someone sets up a garden with a small earthen wall. They get ~6 inches of rain which seems insane for the area which due to poor drainage pools behind the earthen wall until the weight of water bursts the wall. Followed by a wave of water causing surprising amounts to dammage.
The insurance adjuster then says sorry this was caused by standing water not wind / rain.
The important point is drainage issues are generally classified as flooding as are mud slides.
> Floods pose a serious threat to those living in the city, with 61 percent of residents having already experienced water damage to their properties. While rainfall poses a threat from above, rising sea levels threaten the city’s inner islands, which could easily be damaged by flooding if canals overflow.
> The fact that such a major event was only scary for a week seems like a good thing?
It was scary for a week because they were down to a single remaining point of failure (Abbotsford pumping station). If that station failed (which was quite possible, due to rising floodwaters), the Fraser river would have flooded the valley, and Highway 1 would have been... Gone. Not 'flooded for a week', but 'flooded permanently'.
On the other side of the city, mudslides destroyed bridges on the Coquihalla highway - which will take at least 2 months to be made passable - and things won't be back to normal for another year.
Had the pumping station failed, and the highway flooded, it's entirely unclear what anyone could have done in that situation to keep Chilliwack supplied over the next two months.
A good example was the Oso mudslide. Nearby Darrington gets 80 inches a year. (Twice as much as Seattle!) March 2014, a storm drops 3 to 5 inches on soil saturated by six months of rain, and a hill lets go. Killed 43 people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide
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