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That 2019 flood map pinned to a wall in Des Moines changed how I read every disaster stat
I was at a city planning open house in Des Moines back in March, and a FEMA rep had a map showing 100-year flood lines from 2019. A guy next to me pointed out that 3 of the last 5 '100-year' floods in that county happened within 12 years, which is not how a 1% annual chance is supposed to work. I started pulling the raw NOAA data that night and found the same pattern in 4 other counties along the river. Now when I see a headline like 'once in a century storm,' I go straight to the source gauge numbers before I believe it. The term '100-year flood' is basically a coin flip with better marketing if the underlying data is old. Does anyone here have a good rule for spotting when a stat is using an outdated baseline?
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