Vague example: You buy a house, a month later you get a demand letter from the EPA that you need to raise your home, spend millions to clean the ground contamination that was caused by a owner before you were born and more than 3 transactions before yours.

And they are not nice, they will gladly bankrupt you and put you in jail. Selling it or giving it to the EPA to release the obligation is not a option. The EPA can sometimes look a lot like a cartel.