At least not in any land adjacent to a sea which is prone to hurricane/storm activity.
Right after the hurricane and flood of 2005, I heard a number of people, scientists, bloggers and Mayor Nagin included, proclaim that now that New Orleans had experienced its hundred-year storm, we are safe for a long while. Even our local newspaper describes this phenomenon as a “1-in-100-year event” or a “100-year hurricane.” These are misnomers that have sprung up nationwide from the incorrect understanding of flood protection levels provided by levees, floodwalls, seawalls and the like. What the term really refers to is a certain level of flood protection, in this case one based on 1-in-100 odds that such a hurricane/storm will occur in any given year. As a reminder, New Orleans still does not enjoy this measliest level of insurance.
Presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, was here on Thursday and delivered a stirring speech (chock full of specific campaign promises) at Tulane University [VIDEO]. All was good, he got it, except for this paragraph:
We can’t gamble every hurricane season. When I am President, we will finish building a system of levees that can withstand a 100-year storm by 2011, with the goal of expanding that protection to defend against a Category 5 storm. We also have to restore nature’s barriers – the wetlands, marshes and barrier islands that can take the first blows and protect the people of the Gulf Coast.
Obama is not an engineer and understands the issues here better than some scientists, but the phrase “100-year storm” made me cringe. America still doesn’t get it and we cannot afford for the misconception to propagate through nationally-broadcasted speeches. Over the last 29 months, we have had “flooding caused by the federal levees breaking” enter the national vocabulary. Now, it’s time to get “100-year storm/flood protection” out and replace it with “1 in 100 per year flood protection.” I nominated Tim Ruppert, resident engineer well-versed in all things Flood Protection, to write Team Obama on this. Tim delivered.
… Senator, I must tell you there is no such thing as a “100-year storm.”
The terminology “100-year flood” or “100-year storm” may be popular in the common vernacular, but it is patently misleading. What we are really talking about is the flood or storm that has a 1 percent chance of occurring or being exceeded in any given year. It is a theoretical weather event that is used to benchmark the risk of flooding.
Such careless terminology encourages the belief that such storms are rare and only occur once in a lifetime or less. Unfortunately this is not the case.
That 1 percent chance only applies to one year. Once we experience a “bad” year, there is no assurance whatsoever that we will have 99 “good” years. We could, in fact, see two consecutive “100-year” hurricanes occur in back-to-back years.
Read the whole letter; it’s quite polite and well-crafted. Thank you, Tim, and I hope you hear back from the Obama camp soon that they have altered that particular aspect of their message. We have to continue in our obligation to educate and learn in return. It’s coastal Louisiana’s only hope for survival in the midst of fallacies and apathy.
It has gotten pretty frustrating.
It’s like “nucular,” it’s not even cute when Bush pronounces it.
Props to you and Tim Rupert for getting this out there. When I decided to come home, I treated it as a “once in a generation” event, which hopefully it is. Camille was close and Betsy was bad, and the last truly bad one was in the late ’40s. That’s my basis for the once in a generation view. And I understand (props to Mr. Ainsley and the Thoroughbred industry) that in any given year, I probably have an 1-30 or 1-40 or so chance of it happening again, which are not terribly good odds but still manageable.