If we seem a little weird about the rain this week, it’s because this is the seventh anniversary of The Flood in May 2010. Some fun things we learned in the wake of The Flood are that places that don’t require flood insurance can flood. We learned that we put a lot of large creeks below the streets and then kind of forgot they were down there. Surprise! They can still flood. We learned that some people will hire people to clean up their flooded places and some people will do it themselves and some people will just clean up what they can see and then vow to never think about what’s in their walls.

The Pew Charitable Trusts is leading an effort to have a single federal standard for what sellers have to disclose to buyers about flooding. I had thought that we were in pretty good shape here in Tennessee, since the very form that the state provides for disclosures has a question about flooding on there and a question about whether you need flood insurance on the property.

So I asked them why we here should care about their efforts. Their answers were alarming.

Landlords don’t have to tell you if the property you rent flooded. A seller only has to disclose the information they have to the best of their knowledge. So if a place flooded in 2010 and they bought it in 2013, but the previous owner didn’t tell them why they were looking to off-load it so cheap, they don’t have to make any effort to find out that the place flooded before they sell it to you.

Also, they’re not legally required to tell you how often it floods. So, they could say, “Oh, yeah, it flooded in 2010, but that was a once-in-500-year flood,” insinuating that that was the only time it flooded. They don’t have to tell you that you get water in the crawlspace every spring.

And they don’t have to tell you about any flood risk. So if you live downstream from a dam, and your property would not usually flood unless the dam breaks, they don’t have to tell you about the dam. That’s on you to find out.

It also doesn’t seem like the disclosure law requires you to say what you did to the property after it flooded. So you can just say, “We cleaned it up.” You don’t have to specify whether you cleaned it with dish soap or if you hired a specialist to come in and deal with the mold.

So even though we’re in better shape than a lot of states, we’re still not in perfect shape. Hopefully, we can get some national legislation passed, but, in any case, if you’re living in Nashville, ask a lot of questions about flooding.