[s1artibartfast]

The question isn't if but when. If you look at California's geologic record, it has suffered massive flooding every several hundred years AKA Ark storms. The majority of the Central Valley turns into an inland sea in these situations and the locations of many current cities would be underwater.

USGS sediment research in the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara Basin, Sacramento Valley, and the Klamath Mountain region found that "megastorms" have occurred in the years: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, 1750, 1810, and, most recently, 1861–62. Based on the intervals of these known occurrences, ranging from 51 to 426 years, for a historic recurrence of, on average, every 100-200 years

[ccooffee]

What separates the Christmas Flood of 1964[0] from these ARK storms? The wikipedia page discusses 1964 as an "atmospheric river".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_flood_of_1964

[clsec]

I'm not sure but if you look at maps of both floods it seems that weather pattern in 1964 was a lot further north than the 1862 flood. Also, the wiki article for 1862 says that that was an El Nino year.

[uoaei]

Calling out the atmospheric river implies a cause of purely precipitation, whereas the other floods are likely caused by some unfortunate combination of snowmelt runoff and high-precipitation events.

[cgb223]

Waiting for the big flood is kind of like waiting for the big earthquake,

It’s either going to happen tomorrow or 200 years from now, and either way there’s nothing you can do about it except hope you die quickly

[dontreact]

You could avoid living in a place likely to flood during a 100 year flood

[cgb223]

Can’t help it if something like 5 trillion dollars of our economy is built on a fault line and they’re forcing people back to said fault line for in person work

You find a way to get them all to relocate and I’ll book the first ticket