a very special fuck you to the half-bright ogres online telling people smugly that they would simply not live, what, 30 feet above flood stage like some of these folks did

I need to figure out where the nearest benchmark is to my house. 30 feet sounds pretty close to where I'm at

My grad work was mostly on human dimensions of disasters, and I came very strongly to believe that “individual choices” is just 100% the wrong way to think about hazard mitigation at scale. Across the board. Everyone should exorcise that impulse from their minds.

Yes also I hear they were poor people who lived in the mountains? It wasn't like they were rich people building a beach home

Not to put to fine a point on it, but my guess is 60% of these takes come from someone who is under 20.

I live at 5k ft, front range of Colorado on a 100-year flood plain. I did research on my area, picked a place that was doing a reasonable amount of mitigation. There is still a decent risk it'll flood within its lifetime. You can be as prepared as you can afford, nature will still fuck you up.

I would estimate that about 100% of people live somewhere that some kind of climate disaster completely out of their control could upend their lives, and some idiot would blame them for living there. And I would also estimate that at least 90% of people are unaware they live in that scenario.

I'm not familiar with exact numbers but that had to be a 500 or 1000 year storm event or worse

Side note. Apparently my block lists are working great.

*As literal mountain passes are flooding* Why did they not build on higher ground

Why didn't they just move someplace with no floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, landslides, blizzards, hurricanes or drought, hmm?