Once-in-a-lifetime floods are becoming routine

Once rare deadly deluges are happening more frequently and causing damage as the planet heats more up.

- Mark Gongloff

Can a flood be called a thousand-year flood if it happens every five years?

That's a question worth asking this week in the southern US, Central Europe and Central Africa after the latest round of biblical deluges that are becoming increasingly routine and destructive as the planet heats up.

They are reminders that climate change is no longer a problem for our grandchildren - unless those grandchildren happen to be living in our flooded basements.

Regardless of location or economic development, we are ill prepared for the consequences.

Earlier this week, a tropical storm so mediocre that it didn't even merit a name hit the southern coast of North Carolina, around Wilmington, dumping more than 45cm of rain in 12 hours. Meteorologists say this sort of event has a one in 1,000 chance of happening in any given yearsomething more commonly known as a "thousand-year flood".

But the moniker doesn't quite fit when you consider similar disasters also hit the area in 1984, 1999, 2010, 2015 and 2018. Along with the latest flood, that's five in just 25 years.

Despite lacking a name, the rainstorm may have caused US$7 billion (S$9 billion) in damage, private meteorological service AccuWeather estimated.