WaPo leans heavily toward fitting the news to its narratives and is generally terrible with data science. Whether and to what extent these 5 unlikely events is

WaPo leans heavily toward fitting the news to its narratives and is generally terrible with data science. Whether and to what extent these 5 unlikely events is an anomaly depends on the number of measurement locations and the expected year-to-year variability. If there were 5,000 reporting sites, would we be surprised by "5 different 1-in-1000 year flooding events" in one year? Climate change is real, but so are enthymemes and low quality news reporting.