I was reading an article in a local Asheville paper recently that was a roundup of a city meeting regarding zoning of the floodplains. They kept referring to a percentage of a chance of the areas flooding again. They also kept referring to the flooding from Helene as a "500-year flood event" and how we need to prepare for the next 500-year flood event. That's incorrect on 3 fronts:
1) no one appreciates what the percentage of a probability actually looks like (likely not the speaker, definitely not the listeners);
2) it was a 1,000-year flood event (which is much worse); and
3) you don't prepare for the next last, you prepare for the next worst.
A lot of the recovery actions and services offered since Helene propose getting businesses back to where they were. That's not going to be enough to protect them from next time. You want to recover better. Recovering better is making businesses more resilient. Wanting businesses to be located once again in the river district will take more than playing around with zoning laws and grating permits. I have yet to come across any type of plan to build a barrier to slow/defer the flooding that will happen or even talk of one. The absence of any such plan in zoning discussions should be a non-starter.
What concerns me is the leaders of the recovery process are looking to fix it to not even what was (500 vs 1,000 year) and hope it doesn't happen again. That 0.1% chance will stay that way for 1,000 years. That's not what that means. Work with a much worse level - the 10,000 year flood (it's a thing) - so you're fixing it once in a generation, not playing the "what are the chances it would happen again?" When looking at the average, it could always happen again in the next 2 years.
Did many people expect Helene to be followed almost 2 weeks later by Milton? Was it possible though?
Do not attach to false hope in the recovery process, which gives a false sense of security when it is looking at only what was, not what can be. Real security requires resilience, and getting back does not always equate to getting better.
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