People on the coasts live in floodplains too. Living in floodplains is just a fact of life. Has been for 10's of millennia. Romans, Greeks, Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians, Chinese, and so on and so forth back to the beginning. They all built in floodplains. Let's stop jabbing a finger at people and give them a hand instead. If you don't want to lend a hand, that's fine too, just go about your day. No need to denigrate people.
In those cases people had to live on the good farmland, in order to farm it an protect it.
That is no longer a consideration.
I used to work in the city architects for Waterford. We would never ever build public housing on a 100 year floodplain.
Private developers would do it, they shouldnt have gotten planning permission but they inevitably did. They knew they could make a profit as most buyers wouldnt check.. That practice should be illegal.
A mortgage company will not issue a loan for a house on a 100 year flood plain without flood insurance. You can not purchase a house in the US in a 100 year flood plain without knowing you are doing so.
I observe no denigration in his comment. These people made a choice. Sometimes people make bad choices. Sometimes I do. I'm looking at a building that's in a 100 year floodplain. It's a great location, but I know it's going to flood. If I buy it and it floods, I'd accept people telling me that I made a bad decision.
> I observe no denigration in his comment. These people made a choice.
It's not even my personal opinion. I am merely describing the biases of the general public that result in the discrepancy in newsworthiness. It's not due to some coastal conspiracy against inland states. Florida is viewed by many as a backwards state, a popular target for mockery and derision, so a bias against inland states does not explain why hurricanes in Florida get more news coverage than floods in inland states.
To reiterate myself a third time, the discrepancy arises from a perceived, not actual difference in culpability of the victims. People who are hit by hurricanes are thought to be the victims of bad chance, while the people living on floodplains are thought to be people who knowingly tempted fate. That this is not squared up with reality is of little consequence because newsworthiness is not some objective trait; newsworthiness is the product of the subjective biases and worldviews of the general public.
I'll offer another reason for why the discrepancy exists, again relating to hurricanes being named. When a community gets hit by some hurricane, they're not hit by some generic hurricane but rather by a particular hurricane, that had a name and it's own news cycle leading up to contact with the coast. And throughout that news coverage, the location that the hurricane would come to shore at was up in the air. The weather forecasters were offering up stochastic predictions, but none knew for certain. The result of this is it feels like it was pure chance that the hurricane hit one community and not the other. Hurricanes are viewed as discrete independent events that could randomly hit your community, while the more rational point of view would be that at some point your coastal community is probably going to get hit by some hurricane.
In floodplains the chance of a flood is considered as a flat probability per year, or century. The "hundred year flood" is a concept most people are familiar with, even if they misunderstand it[1]. People don't think of hurricanes like that, they don't consider a general hurricane threat. They consider the threat of each individual hurricane as it comes along. The "hundred year flood" concept is not considered for coastal regions, even though it's just as valid there.
Interesting point about naming hurricanes. Perhaps we should formally name floods. The floods here in Pittsburgh are usually the remnants of hurricanes coming north and so do inherit those names. And those ones are perceived differently than when there's just a big snow melt-off. But a flood is a flood. They happen and they are getting worse. We've had five "hundred year floods" here in the last year.
Yes I understand that, but that's not how it's perceived. People do not have objective worldviews, and it is the worldviews of the general public that determine whether or not something is considered newsworthy.
I'm not defending this status quo, I'm explaining it.
Something else to consider: hurricanes are personified. They're given names, and therefore make convenient villains. This increases their newsworthiness. If particularly snowy winters or intense rainstorms were given names, that would increase the newsworthiness of inland floods.
Another thing to consider: when an inland flood occurs due to a dam collapse, rather than because of unnamed weather systems, that becomes more newsworthy and memorable than most hurricanes. I'd say the Johnstown Flood is about as memorable, maybe moreso, than the Galveston Hurricane, despite killing fewer people. That's because the Johnstown Flood was due to a dam collapse. A dam with a name, a discrete object with human owners. That's why an inland flood in rural Pennsylvania is remembered nearly a century and a half later, while most inland floods hardly make the news at all.
Consider also the Great Molasses Flood. By flood standards or even industrial disaster standards, the number of casualties were small. However everybody has heard of the Great Molasses Flood. Why? Because it happened in Boston? No, because it was molasses! That's very unusual, nobody would have anticipated that, and therefore it's newsworthy.
Whoa. Please don't cross into personal attack regardless of what someone else posted. I get that you have good reason to feel strongly about this, but the contract here is that you need to contain your strong feelings when commenting. As do we all.
