Part of it has to do with getting into them, and a bigger part has to do with staying there once you get in.
That's just the way it is.
In my lifetime I've seen Hurricane Hazel visit my homestate of Indiana and rain for 30+ days. Flooded everything. State looked like a lake. Not a culvert or small bridge left anywhere. There was a lot of devastation near creeks and streams that looked like raging rivers.
Yet, when last January 2005 came around, and there were massive rains on top of a 3 foot snowfall leftover from December, and the whole place looked like another Great Lake, with devastation near creeks and sreams on the order of what you would expect from a raging, flood swollen Mississippi River, the Main Stream Media, local media, and even amateur soothsayers and tale spinners didn't seem to recall or know about the devastation nearly half a century ago.
There was little written about it at the time in fact, because, lo and behold, there was so much disruption of normal life it just didn't get written.
Still, people knew.
BTW, the damage in 2005 was substantially less than that of the earlier floods ~ mostly because folks learned what to do to make sure the damage didn't happen. Part of it has to do with NOT BUILDING IN THE FLOOD PLAIN, and certainly NOT IN THE FLOOD PATH!
One would hope New Orleans folks, and other Gulf Coast folks as well, would learn.
IIRC, on the day of the Chicago fire, a fire struck a Wisconsin town with even more deadly effect and yet less was written of it at the time.