Your comment goes on to show that human intution aligns with an assumption that things are distributed with a thin tail (for example Gaussian like). On the othe

Your comment goes on to show that human intution aligns with an assumption that things are distributed with a thin tail (for example Gaussian like). On the other hand if the phenomena has a fat tail (Pareto for example) then runs of such 'extremes' are not unusual. What is interesting is that one of the motivations (funding wise) for understanding fat tailed distribution, extreme value distributions were indeed flooding and dyke failure events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_value_theory#Univariate_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_value_theory#Univariat...