Fort Bend County Judge Robert Hebert stated that Hurricane Harvey is more like a 800-year event, as quoted from the statement from Monday, reported by the same newspaper WaPo[1]
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/2...
[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/08/2...
500 years, 800 years ... even 1000 years - none of those are timetables that planning for city ^H^H^H^H region the size of Houston should be operating on.
A city that large, that populous and with that much economic activity that is crucial to the world should be using risk models to 10k year events.
This is not unprecedented - Holland's dykes are designed and built to withstand 10k year events:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/15/world/europe/...
Sounds like the Judge is preparing the country for the fact that nothing will still be done about it.
The problem is that Houston is a big city and its population has been rising very quickly, and the city government's efforts have been insufficient. And since the Texas state government is dominated by gotta-keep-government-small-and-taxes-low Republicans, Houston has received almost no assistance from the state in this regard. We are seeing the results of that today.
The "wall" (actually a more complex thing) was projected to cost 8 bil. A bad flood like the one from today was projected to cost 70+, but people were hoping that we have around 10-20 years to prepare
Seems like every city, county, state, etc. screw up planning on less than human time scales - pensions and infrastructure maintenance for instance.
I wouldn't make this claim though...
That's exactly the point. We don't have that baseline, despite acting as if we do. We would need data going back 5,000 years to do that.
But he's going off of what is established, whether that is faulty or not.
So his claim is based on something faulty, but it is based on something.
Your qualm is not with him or his statements, rather with the standards for current 10 year/100 year/500 year estimates.