Thread: Floods - Stupid things journos say

Must admit I had a laugh at the comment from the resident who bought in 1975 and did not expect a flood for another 100 years!!

The misguided belief that a 1 in 100 year flood occurs every 100 years is one reason why flood engineers etc now talk in terms of Annual Exceedance Probability (AEP). A 1 in 100 year event, or an event with an Average Recurrence Interval (ARI) of 100 years, is better termed as having a 1% Annual Exceedance Probability(AEP), or it has a 1% chance of occuring in any given year. A 1 in 50 year (ARI) event would have an AEP of 2% etc.

I recall when I lived on the south coast on NSW, we had one small catchment that had two 1% AEP events on one year, about 3 months apart. It is possible but very unlikely!

Cheers,
Chris

like the new bridge that was built from the back of RAAF amberly into one mile..

not supposed to go underwater except in 1/100 year floods and it went under a month after it opened and again inside of 6 months later and now less than 2 years after that....

love to see how they use that in statistics....

the bridge that was only ment to go under once every hundred years or so has now been flooded out on average once every 8 months since its construction was finished.

I'd like to compliment, and, express my sincerest thanks to all you blokes based in the flood areas.

Your posts have given me a better understanding of what was going on and how it was affecting the people of the flood areas.

The TV and media in general was becoming very repetitive and as noted on this thread - at times downright stupid!

My staff and colleagues were always asking me to "get onto your Land Rover mates so we know what is going on" .

Not to mention the camaradie that has shone through. They reckoned the tug-boat skipper was a hero, well we have a few heroes amongst you blokes.

Originally Posted by isuzurover

Umm, no... I mean:

According to:

Wikipedia,
All these references that wikipedia cites:

and the undergraduate hydrology/hydraulics I can still remember.

But no, you got us, we made it all up...



EDIT - and just for the hell of it, one more - just grabbed an old text "Hydraulics in civil and envionmental engineering by chadwick and morefett, 1993. Chapter 10 deals with how to determine the 5, 10, 50, 100 etc year flows for a given catchment/river system.

Thanks - I would have settled for an in-text citation, but have considered your appeal and will allow your point, and return the marks I deducted for improper referencing....

As you were....

Originally Posted by Bushie

Was thinking along them lines today - Rockhampton, Gympie lots of other places seem to have miraculously disappeared.

Martyn

Forget Rocky and Gympie, what about the towns west that were completely submerged Emerald, Theodore and all the others? And forget Australia what about Sri-Lanka, Philippine and Brazil?

The flooding in Rocky was relatively minor and just an inconvenience for 99% of the town. I feel for the 1% but it was no where near as bad as the media made it out to be.

One story of devastation from one of the blokes at work was that when he went out to brecky with his misses, they were served toast instead of croissants (Oh the humanity).

A reporter on TV today said.........."several helicopters have made their way up to Queensland from Victoria, crossing Bass Straight on their way"

A flood, like any natural disaster, brings out different things in different people.
For TV journalists: a chance to get their face on telly
For politicians: a chance to increase their popularity (and to get their face on telly)
For sportsmen: a chance to show that the spurious claim of their heroism may not be so misplaced.
For the general public: a chance to show the world that you are a caring and generous people with no regard to race, religion or nationality, irrespective of what is reported in the media to the contrary.
To the poor victims: that it will take more than this to make them bend and break.
Good luck to all you guys up there.

PS: Sorry, this is a bit off the subject of the post, but I got it off my chest anyway

Originally Posted by rijidij

A reporter on TV today said.........."several helicopters have made their way up to Queensland from Victoria, crossing Bass Straight on their way"

must have gone to uni