As Evans points out, so-called folk memories of events thousands of years in the past (ancient floods, that sort of thing) have since been proven correct.
In 1873, Joaquin Miller's wrote in Life Amongst the Modocs how a prospector who had his camp washed away in a flood "danced a sort of savage hokee-pokee" in despair.
But thanks to climate change, which can prevent the thick snowpack from which spring floods draw their strength, that sort of flood may be less likely to happen today.
It would cause coastal flooding of the sort that now happens once or twice a century to occur every few years.
Therefore, at each Oued Mejerda flood a granulometric sorting is carried out where the coarse elements are initially deposed.
"Someone, from the prime minister to the council, really needs to sort out flood defences in the city centre.
The media centre here is basically a big tent, so the noise of the downpour was quite dramatic and anyone following all the tweets sent out during that time may have drawn the conclusion that some sort of flood was in progress.
His voicemail was full of messages from virtually everyone he knew, all of them frantic about some sort of flood.
"It didn't smell," said Jess, a person who went to the rave, in an interview with student publication The Tab. "It wasn't a sewer, it was like a storm drain or some sort of flood defense – or that's what I got told it was, but there was sooo much mud.
For one thing, he says, developers rely heavily on floodplain maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) that demarcate where we can expect so-called 100-year floods the sort of flood that can be expected once every 100 years.
