To add more to what Targan has said, the floods rate as news here obviously but they don't have the fear factor ramped up on them because they are a semi-regular occurrence - it's just that they occur once every 20 years (give or take 5 years) or in some cases every 50 years (give or take 10 years).
People who've lived in those regions for 40+ years tend to refer to these events as 20 year or 50 year floods (for obvious reasons).
It's a cycle that's been going on for literally forever but it gets very dramatic here because some people seem to think that if a flood is only likely to occur once in twenty years then it's not going to happen. These are the same people you see on the news screaming for government assistance and generally making out the story to be far worse than it is when the flood actually occurs.
The moral of the story is: -
Don't build your home on a floodplain, no matter how cheap the land - unless you build it on stilts.
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