I feel relatively lucky.
If anyone would find a little anecdote at how I laughed about a previous prat of a landlord and flooding, read on, otherwise scroll on by...
I lived for a few years in a flat in a house a very, very short distance from where I grew up. There was some damp and dry rot and I tried to warn the landlord the cellar was flooded. No, he didn't believe me and I couldn't prove it because he'd boarded up the cellar door.
So why was I sure?
It was a semi and the other half had flooding. How much effort does it take to have a natter from time to time with the next door's landlord?
But more to the point, I remembered a similar thing happening when I was much younger, very close by. The local industry and businesses weren't doing well and there'd been building over gardens etc. And? Local industry has an effect on the water table, and in places like this you can almost measure the local economy by how high the water table is. A few years back, out of curiosity, I asked a few taxi drivers whether it mapped on in whichever bits of the city they knew well and they said yes, and two mentioned closure of a particular factory in a different part of the city.
But the biggie was, as I laughed with others at, the house was near the bottom of a long, steep hill, and some of the local place names reflect what was here in the past. If you didn't know the area, you could get a fair idea of which areas were fields/pasture and which were wooded, and which were the surroundings of manor houses just by the place names. You can tell the difference partly also by the type/age of houses and what other sorts of place names there are locally. There have been different naming practices in different places and in different eras.
So it's enough of a hint to warrant checking out when the road at the bottom of the hill has a name that is rather 'watery' when the other roads about also have names indicating the old geography. I don't want to use the actual name, but to use road names from elsewhere, its like when you have a 'Brook Road' or a '[Place name] Stream' or 'Wet Lane'.
As a youngster, I liked having a cellar because it felt like security against war, but it's not so useful when the threat is flooding.
