The California Mega Flood Disaster

That Will Reshape The Nation

By: Richard Murch

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Over One Trillion Dollars — The Greatest Financial Catastrophe in American History and the Long Shadow of Environmental Ruin with Over Forty Million People Evacuated and their Lives Ruined.

This book begins with a fact that should be impossible to ignore and has, for decades, been ignored anyway: California has flooded before, catastrophically, within living memory of the republic, and it will flood again. The question has never been whether. The question has always been when — and whether we will be ready.

The event described in the pages that follow has been called the ARkStorm — short for Atmospheric River 1,000-year Storm.

But that name, however scientifically precise, fails to capture what is really at stake. A thousand-year storm does not mean a storm that occurs once every thousand years. It means a storm of such magnitude that, in any given year, the probability of it occurring is approximately one in one hundred.

In a fifty-year lifetime, the odds of experiencing such an event approach forty percent. In a state of forty million people, living in a landscape whose geology and hydrology make it one of the most flood-vulnerable places on Earth, those are not reassuring odds.

What the scientists who first modeled the ARkStorm scenario understood — and what this book attempts to make plain to a wider audience — is that the storm is not a distant abstraction. It is a near-certainty on any meaningful civilizational timescale, and the window in which California can prepare for it is not infinite. Infrastructure ages. Development expands into floodplains. Climate change intensifies atmospheric rivers and strips away the snowpack that historically served as a natural buffer against runoff.

Every year of inaction is a year of compounding vulnerability.