Leadership Quote by Earl Blumenauer

Blumenauer is doing something politicians rarely attempt in public: teaching statistical thinking as a moral act. The 96 percent figure punctures the soothing, homegrown myth that “if it hasn’t happened lately, it won’t happen.” He’s not just warning about water; he’s calling out the cognitive trap that lets communities keep building, buying, and voting as if risk resets every dry year.

The line “without global warming” is the quiet knife. It preempts the familiar dodge that climate change is the whole story, or conversely that acknowledging baseline danger is “alarmism.” By establishing that the odds are already overwhelming in a supposedly stable climate, he makes climate disruption an accelerant, not the only culprit. That matters politically: it widens the coalition. Even the voter who rolls their eyes at carbon policy still has to reckon with insurance markets, mortgage-backed risk, infrastructure costs, and the simple arithmetic of loss.

His second sentence is the real target: the way anecdote steamrolls actuarial reality. Several uneventful years become a civic lullaby, a reason to oppose zoning limits, mitigation spending, or buyouts. Blumenauer is stripping away that comfort and replacing it with a harsher frame: floodplains aren’t “unlucky” when they flood; they’re doing what the map promised.

Contextually, it lands in a moment when “100-year flood” has become a misleadingly calm phrase, used by developers and local officials as if it means rarity rather than near-certainty over a typical mortgage lifetime. The intent is legislative as much as rhetorical: make resilience and retreat sound like fiscal prudence, not surrender.