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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday May 29 2018, @06:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the flood-insurance-FTW dept.

Common Dreams reports

A Maryland city was devastated [May 27] after 6-inches of heavy rain caused a downtown flash flood. Major damage is reported and many cars have been swept away.

Ellicott City was still recovering from a flash flood two years ago that killed two and forced the historic city to rebuild much of its Main Street. Residents said Sunday's flood seemed even worse than the storm in July 2016--which was called an extremely rare "one-in-1,000 year event", and cost the city tens of millions of dollars in damages.

Additional information at:
The Baltimore Sun
The Washington Post
USAToday


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:11PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29 2018, @03:11PM (#685648)

    WTF, that's the geometric distribution, not binomial. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_distribution [wikipedia.org]

    Besides that, it also assumes that there is no correlation for the reasons behind any two floods and that the probability of a flood is exactly the same every year. If this is the type of back of the napkin, first-pass analysis being used you should be scared for your town. There is no reason to expect those assumptions to hold, so no reason to be surprised that the model predicts the wrong thing, and so no reason to try attributing it to any specific cause.

    And anyway, even if those assumptions were good enough, we need to know many towns are seeing too few or the expected rate of "hundred year floods", keeping track of a bunch and only reporting the places with "excess" floods is cherry picking.

    There are so many things wrong here, its total cargo culting. I don't see any hope of coming to a correct conclusion using this process.