When the telephone rang at 6:45 AM on that March 2024 morning, the restaurant owner in Belleville, Ontario had already been awake for 2 hours, surveying the damage that a burst water pipe had inflicted on the 4,500-square-foot premises. Water had cascaded through the ceiling overnight, saturating the dry storage area where hundreds of kilograms of flour, rice, pasta, and specialty ingredients awaited the week's service. The walk-in cooler's compressor had shorted from water intrusion, and the internal temperature had risen to 12 degrees Celsius by the time the owner arrived, rendering the perishable inventory questionable at best. With 11 years of operation behind them, the owner knew the restaurant could not survive a prolonged closure, and so when a restoration contractor who had worked on a neighbouring business offered to begin emergency extraction within the hour, the decision seemed obvious. By 10:30 AM, the contractor's crew had removed the waterlogged ceiling tiles, extracted standing water from the kitchen, and hauled 47 bags of contaminated dry goods to a dumpster behind the building. By 2:15 PM, when the owner finally reached the claims line of the national insurance carrier, the physical evidence of the loss had been substantially altered, and the inventory that would later form the subject of a disputed claim had already been destroyed.