Houston is experiencing its third ‘500-year’ flood in 3 years
While the article obliquely makes reference to this, I wonder if this is somewhat similar to the &quot;birthday&quot; problem in statistics. Any given person has ~1 in 365 chance of being born on a particular day. Yet, if you have 30 people in a room, there is a greater than 50 percent chance that at least one PAIR has the same birthday. Given the hundreds of cities (thousands?) in the US that may be affected by a flood, it&#x27;s actually quite likely that at least one of them could have a pretty high probability of experiencing one in 500 chance of something each year. I haven&#x27;t run the numbers, of course, but we&#x27;re looking at Houston in isolation - it needs to be seen in the broader context of all possible cities. We&#x27;re focusing on the individual probability of Houston having this improbable string of events, rather than looking at Houston only being the city that experienced this phenomenon.<p>Of course, the &quot;once in 500 years flood&quot; may also be an inaccurate probability as well, but if its not, then I&#x27;m not surprised this is happening SOMEWHERE.