When we were still living in Maryland, we had a basement flood like that once. It was awful ... almost traumatic! It did enough damage that the basement had to be cleared out and completely redone, so we were without half our house for months (contractor troubles too!) with half our life packed in a pod in the driveway.

When we moved up here, before we looked in any sort of serious way at a house, we checked that it wasn't on a flood plain. (Our house in Maryland wasn't either, but we had a small earthquake a couple months earlier, and I think it dislodged a drain.)