I have the newspaper clipping of my grandmother being rescued from her home via dinghy by city rescue workers. Everyone I knew had their house ruined in hours after weeks of shoveling sandbags fruitlessly in front of the neighborhoods and homes.
And that was just the flood damage and personal effect , itself.
Untold amounts of environmental and biological damage occurred when sea-levels were temporarily higher than any of the sanitation and oil-recollection facilities that were in town.
That said , snow sucks, but i'd rather sweep it off my roof and winterize my plumbing than attempting to figure out the physics behind flood-proofing acres of land (almost always fruitlessly) and having to surf in sewage for years past the event.
> i'd rather sweep it off my roof
Any significant amount of snow in LA would crush every single one of those beautiful flat modernist roofs. Snow load is no joke.
/Spent an hour shoveling snow today
Except when it all melts in spring all at once and the river(s) flood their surroundings. The ones that stupid (or corrupt or both) city planners and developers have been building on for years now. Flood plains? What's that? Oh you mean all that nice river front property that would sell for really great prices?
The bridge I used to take to work (before covid) is also affected by this. Both in the sense that the only other bridge to take from here was getting closed due to the rivers water level, meaning traffic doubled overnight and in the sense that we were mere inches away from that bridge also having to close.
That is one of the curious things about Colorado--creeks that are about shin deep 11 months of the year, bank full for a few days, and then subside back to shin deep.
But guess what? It isn't just in snow country that people love to build in flood plains. Have a look at Houston.
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/opg-flood-review-1.537...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_River_of_the_North#Floods
The Maritimes especially gets all sort of weather.
