Talk to any scientist long enough, and eventually they’ll bring up an old aphorism: all models are wrong, but some are useful. Even with better data, and more sophisticated tools to collect it, there’s no truly perfect way to capture the dynamic world that we live in.
Two years ago, Texans learned that truth the hard way when Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast. The storm was classified as a 500-year storm. But neighborhoods that FEMA’s flood maps never predicted to flood—even in a storm of that size—experienced historic, devastating flooding.
