Floods are the natural behavior of streams, not abnormal events

Evidence

It should be noted that flooding constitutes the natural, rather than abnormal, behavior of streams. Floods can occur in almost any river valley at almost any time. They are, of course, usually unpredictable, and people tend to think of them as extraordinary precisely because of the difficulty of forecasting flood patterns over any given short span of years. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 1803

Categorization

• QUESTION: Interesting for environmental-justice thread: if flooding is natural stream behavior, then flood insurance/zoning framing treats a normal process as a risk to be priced. Worthy of cross-course note.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the environmental-justice shared thread — settlements in floodplains as human choice about land/place interacting with natural systems, an institutional/public-policy angle rather than the trees/sacrifice topics of the published articles.
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
• XREF: connects to: Cheap flood insurance creates moral hazard by encouraging settlement in flood-prone areas — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 1786; Contradictory engineered water management signals the loss of flood equilibrium — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 424