The seemingly high occurence of rare events is an artifact of how much we're measuring. If you have a thousand independent weather stations, every year you'll

The seemingly high occurence of rare events is an artifact of how much we're measuring. If you have a thousand independent weather stations, every year you'll see a "thousand year" event at one of them. We just didn't notice the other 999 that didn't. Same deal as how data centers manage equipment failures. If the drives have a million-hour MTBF, but you have a million drives, you're replacing one every hour. Thousand-year events happen all the time when you have a thousand trials. This one may have been something wilder like 1 in 20k years, and among 1k endpoints you'll see that every 20 years, and this could be comparable to Katrina which was now 20 years ago. How do you shore up infrastructure: either you spend a ton of money, or you don't do it and deal with the cleanup afterwards. Each additional 9 of reliability costs 10x. At some point the cleanup for one point is less than shoring up all of them.