This perpetuates a common misunderstanding – one that leads people to make the major decision to purchase a home a largely uniformed one.
Ask longtime residents of the Chehalis River Basin how many “100-year” floods they have seen.
Federal, state and local flood management officials are moving away from the misleading nomenclature.
They try to call it what it really is: the 1 percent chance flood. That means if you live or work in the floodplain, in any year the chance of your home or business being inundated is 1 percent.
While that sounds low, it means that in the course of holding a standard 30-year loan on a home in the floodplain, your likelihood of being in a serious flood is actually more like 30 percent.
With the likelihood of catastrophic flooding being what it really is, perhaps the money spent over the last 20 years in the Chehalis basin on finding a “solution to flooding” would have been better spent buying out homes and businesses, and relocating them to safer locations.
