f you say: “Nobody could have known.”
I hear: “We shut out the people who tried to warn us.”
Yes, I do realize that we live in a world of probabilistic events. Lots of things happen that nobody could know in advance. A particular power outage from a hurricane making landfall in an unexpected way may well have been a low-probability event. What was certain was that infrastructure was creaky and that extreme, unpredictable weather events are increasing. To me, “Nobody could have known” usually signifies a lack of attention on known issues and a refusal to integrate warnings from naysayers. Less honest than of “we played the probabilities and lost,” I think “nobody could have known” tries to assert the strategic validity of wishful thinking. I hate it.