Forget earthquakes, the biggest threat to California is a massive “megastorm” that scientists say comes every 100 to 200 years. At a conference sponsored by the U.S. Geological Survey, Federal Emergency Management Agency, and its California branch, a team of more than 100 scientists, engineers, and emergency planners used flood mapping to simulate a catastrophe. The simulation and study showed a storm so intense that it could potentially dump 10 feet of rain, bring in hurricane-force winds, relocate 1.5 million people and exact $30 billion in damages. In the study, which took two years to complete, geologists examined prehistoric floods and found storms like this to occur every 300 years, but say that they will occur more frequently due to global warming.
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