I will not live long term on land that has historically been subject to flooding, or where the site forms part of a constricted drainage.

There are enough risks in life that cannot be realistically mitigated. No sense exposing your family to one day in and day out that is just a matter of choice. Unfortunately, humans are terrible about understanding probabilistic risks, and our short, brutal lives offer little opportunity to appreciate the nature of long-period risk.

A “hundred year flood” means that there is a seventy percent chance that your house will be wiped away within your lifetime. It’s like choosing to be habitually reckless with fire in your home. We aren’t reckless with fire because the risk is very tangible and within our control. Long period risks are just as real and often just as much within our control, but we have to think in terms of math and not our “feeling” of security. Our instincts about safety and security are honed over millions of years to understand what is a safe Place to camp for the night. We are not intrinsically equipped to viscerally understand this kind of risk.

For that kind of structure, you must tie the rebar in - best is to have the entire length of the rebar for the column splay at the base and be threaded through and tied into the rebar for the footing, pour the footing, and then pour the columns as soon as the footing is cured enough to support the mass, but before it’s totally hard. That way the footing and the columns form a continuous structure, without any point where they can just lift or shear off.

I speak from experience, having built exactly this type of structure myself, and seeing it resist an enormous flood and a barrage of high-speed trees, unscathed. Absolute mess inside the timber structure atop, but anyone trapped within would have survived.

Unfortunately what they had there was a disaster waiting to happen.

We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see the river rise… and rise… and rise - and in the nick of time came to the realisation that we had to evacuate, NOW. Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.

Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one, the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam, inches of mud coating every surface. The chimney had washed away.

The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a reason, it turns out.

We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler in tow, as well as the cats.

Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the 99.9% of the time it isn’t trying to kill us, it couldn’t be better.

We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of mountain that decide to visit.

Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."

It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"

I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.

I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.

Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.

And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.

Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.

A wonderful novella in this context. Hard science fiction in one respect, with correct physics, but also literature in my opinion: https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Ch...

Being a democratic government does not mean you can’t be proactive and have emergency services. Does he think Switzerland has a public consultation every time there’s an avalanche?

In the US the latter used to be FEMA’s job, and with respect to the former the feds allocated flood (and more generally disaster) mitigation funds, for the day decade or so Texas has systematically ignored those funds or tried to route them elsewhere, and in 2021 under ARPA the county was awarded millions which could have been used for flood alert and prevention but decided to not do any of that for political reasons, and send most of it to the PD instead.

Anyways, I unfortunately believe most of the deceased likely perished within minutes of being swept away. I don’t know how any response time could beat that especially given the terrain and conditions at the time. I think what is going to come of this will be an alert system similar to tornado sirens we have up in Dallas. If people could have been woken up and moved to higher ground even with just 10 minutes notice, the death stats would be significantly lower. If I had property anywhere near this (there are other similar rivers in the region), I’d be installing something on my property right now.

Texas has been run by Republicans for all of living memory, and when it was given money for spending on this exact situation (flash flood warning system), it was given it by Democrats, and therefore politicized the money by spending it on police (the framing being that democrats don't want police to be funded, which is of course absurd). American bureaucracy is rendered nearly nonfunctional by overpoliticization such as this. I can't remember the last time a funding bill was being voted on that didn't result in a government shutdown or nearly so. Imagine a country's legislative body being so politicized it can't even fund the country's bureaucratic organs. Clownish behavior.

Meanwhile the PRC, for all its flaws, suffers none of this oppositional politicizing. The downside is that corruption can run much deeper and essentially unchallenged so long as it serves the greater needs of the one party, among other things. The upside is that the majority of the government's power (which includes money) is spent with remarkably little waste and redirection, despite that corruption.

However in the specific case of the floods it's almost certain that the CPC's propaganda arms worked overtime to make it seem like there was less death and damage from the flooding than there really was. There's a large class of "undocumented" poverty class people in the PRC that lose swaths of their populations in disasters like this and it's very easy to hide their deaths.

If liberal democracies want to survive they need to be better at governing than something like the PRC or they're all going to be wiped out on the global marketplace as the PRC overcomes its historical issues and further solidifies and enriches its population and infrastructure.

This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste of resources to live there.

As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.

"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.

The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.

Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."