Two weeks ago, my city flooded for the first time in almost a hundred years. Sixteen inches of rain fell in three days. A week later, every street told the same story: front lawns stacked with floorboards, carpet, mattresses, gym equipment, baby cribs.

Everything that used to live in someone’s basement, sitting on the curb.

Our house came through untouched. No cracks, no sewer backup, no damage. As far as we can tell, we did one thing our neighbours didn’t. I pay Roto-Rooter three hundred dollars a year to grind the tree roots out of our sewer line. I complain about that bill every single time. This year it might have saved us twenty-five thousand dollars.

I’ve seen water like this before.

I grew up near the Grand River, and I remember when it rose from two feet to nineteen after one storm. There’s a photo from that flood still passed around fifty years later: a police officer at the busiest corner downtown, arms folded, water up to his armpits.

Twenty years ago I walked through New Orleans three months before Katrina. What I remember most is going back a year later and finding whole neighbourhoods that hadn’t moved.

I also learned, the hard way, what “Act of God” means in an insurance policy. It means you eat the difference. Every homeowner on our street who got hit is looking at a payout somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand dollars. That doesn’t come close to covering what they lost.

Looking for Someone to Blame

What struck me more than the water was the blame. Social media turned on the city fast. Homeowners with cracked foundations were furious about infrastructure and said nothing about what runs under their own property line. Nobody wanted to hear that something like 85 Olympic pools’ worth of rain fell on this city in three days. When the mayor and our provincial and federal reps were slow to respond, because they had their own flooded basements, that delay got read as not caring.

I watched all of it. The panic, the anger, the genuinely decent response from the city and the province, and the quiet decency of most people just showing up for their neighbours. And I landed on something.

We throw around “they don’t know what they don’t know” when we’re annoyed. Someone won’t buy what we’re selling, someone does something we think is obviously wrong, and we reach for that line like an insult. But it means something more literal than that. We only understand what we’ve actually lived through.

Most of us have had a cold, fallen in love, had our hearts broken, gone to school. We can lean on that. Fewer of us have raised a child through a serious illness, or buried a parent, or fought cancer. Fewer still have stood in a flooded basement, watched a wildfire cross a highway, or felt a bridge move under a car.

If you’ve never lived through a disaster, where would the composure to respond to one calmly come from? Most people don’t have it, because most people have never needed it.

That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when something bad lands on people with no reference point for it. The brain reaches for a cause. A person. A department. A name. Someone has to be responsible, because the alternative is accepting that 85 swimming pools of rain fell out of the sky and nobody could have stopped all of it.

The same gap explains more than flood anger. It’s why some people still think this summer is exactly as hot as every summer they remember, and others know, in their gut, that it isn’t. It’s why we won’t hire the person who could get us unstuck, because we’ve never watched anyone else get unstuck.It’s why we argue with our doctor, our mechanic, our insurance agent, convinced we know better, when what we actually have is an opinion and they have twenty years of pattern recognition we were never in the room for.

We don’t know what we don’t know. That’s not a throwaway line. It’s the whole explanation.

Walking past those piles of ruined furniture

I realize nobody on that street chose this. Nobody’s foundation cracked because they were careless, any more than mine held because I was virtuous. I paid a plumber three hundred dollars a year for ten years running. That’s not wisdom. That’s luck with a maintenance contract attached.

The people yelling at the city aren’t wrong that some of the infrastructure failed. They’re wrong that blame is where the story ends. A hundred years of “normal” rain just stopped applying, and none of us, city included, had lived through what comes after that yet.

You can’t shortcut your way past that gap. You can only close it by paying attention to people who’ve already been through what you haven’t, before you need the lesson yourself. This week, that means fewer opinions about who’s at fault, and more casseroles left on porches. Next storm, it might mean listening to someone who’s flooded before, instead of the internet.