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Analytical frameworks such as the Public Arena Model in sociology, the Advocacy Coalition Framework in political sciences, and the discontinuities in geography were tested to determine how flood management can become a social problem. The article aims to show how, for the Sacramento River, the risk perception, discourse, and policy changed under the influence of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. We used newspapers to highlight the potential of new outlets as a data source to develop critical and genealogical perspectives and to develop a discourse analysis of policy trajectories of floods. Media coverage was based on a textual data analysis of 340 articles published in The Sacramento Bee, one of the main regional newspapers in California, from 2005 to 2013. Risk perception is based on different historical and spatial references, between here and there. An external event can influence the political subsystem because of a top-down policy, but such a policy can entail arrangements and contestations at a local scale.