By any measure, the sheer volume of water that has descended upon the entire Michiana region this week is mind-boggling.
All-time record-breaking floods are occurring in South Bend, Goshen, Niles and Plymouth. Places like Elkhart and LaPorte are narrowly missing all-time marks.
In South Bend alone, the city has broken two single-day precipitation records (Monday and Tuesday), set the all-time record for wettest February day (Tuesday) and set a new record for all-time wettest February with a week to spare.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday called it a 500-year flood.
“When we talk about flooding in an area we don’t have 500 or 1,000 years of records,” said David Call, an associate professor of meteorology at Ball State University in Muncie. “We extrapolate out, we graph it out based on the data we do have. When people say a 500-year flood, it’s what we would expect the magnitude of flooding to be once every 500 years.”
Call said that doesn’t mean once you’ve had a significant event like this, however, that it won’t happen again sooner.
“It’s like when you have a six-sided dice, you would expect your odds of rolling a six to be one-in-six,” Call said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t roll six three times in a row. Although, it’s unlikely, it’s possible.”
Matt Rudkin, chief meteorologist at WSBT-TV, said South Bend has seen nearly 8 inches of liquid precipitation this month. The wettest February on record in 1976 saw 5.23 inches.