I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades - largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of course, considering geological scale.
Being fine for decades is not a useful metric, unfortunately.
If you want to know, look into the last time it was flooded.
If it has never flooded in the scope of human history, it’s possible that the danger of flooding is indeed not significant.
If it has flooded, it will likely flood again.
If it is a flood plain, it will probably flood again many, many times. Weather changes associated with climate change may exacerbate this. It would not be particularly surprising to see the variance in significant precipitation events to double, triple , or more.
In any rate, climate change aside, it would not be particularly remarkable for a flood risk that aggregates to one in ten years to not flood for 50 years running, just as it would not be unexpected if some such areas flooded each year for 3 years straight. Both of those events would be consistent with patterns that would be expected to happen in the big picture.
I know nothing of your situation, but if I were living within less than 100 feet of the altitude of a nearby river or sea, I would consider moving. Life is short, and in my tiny life I have been humanly connected to floods, tsunamis, and hurricanes within my direct circle of friends and family enough to internalize that these risks are not theoretical.
When an existential risk can be categorically eliminated from your life, it is often worth doing.
One of the things about natural disasters, is that everyone focuses on the big, kinetic ones, like fires, volcanoes, tornados, earthquakes, etc.
But the one that kills the most people, and does the most damage, is good ol' H₂O; water. The giver of life. Even with hurricanes, most of the damage is done by the flooding. Up here, we had Sandy, which, I think was only a Cat 2 or 3, but did 70 Billion dollars' worth of damage, and killed a bunch of folks.
Hulu has a great documentary on the Tsunami from 2004, in the Indian Ocean. It was a true horror.
Insurance companies sure as hell know this. Try getting home insurance in an area that they deem "flood-prone" (you might be surprised, where they say so). I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
> I think that most big insurance companies have refused to insure homes, in many parts of Florida.
Yes, and instead of making the people who choose to live there bear the true cost of that choice, we instead create state-owned flood insurance plans that subsidize the risk for (typically wealthy) coastal homeowners.
> I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades
For the non-expert reader, I must point out that there are many factors that contribute to how "safe" rivers are.
Large parts of texas are flat, or have flat lands further up the water shed. This means that wide areas of rain, even though modest all get funneled into small areas. This is a common cause flash flooding.
More over the river basins are wide and flat too, which means that there isnt much to slow the water down and no shelter for when it comes.
In the same way that some costal areas have tame tides, and other have 7 meter swells, or where I grew up, tides that come in as fast as you can run.
