The Seventh Circuit is becoming a difficult venue for insurers. In November we reported that the Court of Appeals had held that the phrase “continuous or repeated exposure” in definition of occurrence meant that a continuous trigger theory applied, leaving the carrier exposed to a claim for 11 years of gradual water damage that was first reported 5 years after the last insurance policy expired. Last month, in Advance Cable Co. v. Cincinnati Ins. Co., 2015 WL 3630699, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 9805 (7th Cir., Jun. 11, 2015), the same court held that cosmetic hail damage to a roof that had no affect on the structure’s functionality or life expectancy nonetheless constituted “direct physical loss” and required the insurer to pay for a replacement.
Advance Cable had a building in Middleton, Wisconsin that sustained hail damage on April 3, 2011. The insurer’s claim representative inspected the roof and observed no damage. Six months later, the policyholder was contemplating a sale, and the buyer had the structure looked at. Its inspector stated that there was “definitely hail damage,” and the insured asked the carrier to reopen its claim. The resulting report by the insurer’s representative found hail dents up to 1” in diameter but concluded that these neither “affect[ed] the performance of the [roof] panels” nor “detract[ed] from the panels’ life expectancy.” There was no evidence of record to the contrary. Read more ›
The policyholder was a developer that was converting an office building in Tribeca in lower Manhattan into luxury condominiums when Superstorm Sandy flooded the premises in October of 2012. The storm caused more than $20 million in property damage and delay in completion loss. The insured had a builder’s risk policy with a $115 million overall limit of liability, but there was a $7 million sub-limit for delay in completion and a $5 million sub-limit for “all losses or damages arising during a continuous condition as defined in the definition of FLOOD.”
Last Thursday in 
At the present time, Oklahoma is at the “sharp end of the spear” with respect to this issue because the state experienced fully 567 quakes of Magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2014. That is the more than in the proceeding 30 years combined, and Oklahoma is on track to see fully 1100 such earthquakes n 2015! When he released his bulletin in March, the state’s Insurance Commissioner stated that his office would assume that the state’s quakes were not man-made “[u]ntil a legal ruling is made.” It now appears that just such a ruling may well be coming in the Sooner State.
The policyholder owned a home in St. Charles that sustained siding damage in a hailstorm in April 2012. The damage was confined to the home’s northern side, and the carrier paid the actual cash value for replacement of all of the siding on that portion of the building. Because the original siding was no longer manufactured, however, the insured contended that she was entitled to recover for replacing the siding on the entire structure, and she brought suit after the insurer refused. 
The policyholder operated a welding business in Uniondale, and the company stored scrap metal in an ungated yard on the property. As summarized by the court, the undisputed facts were as follows:
Washington State has long been a jurisdiction with no judicial pronouncement as to the meaning of the term “collapse” in a property insurance policy, but that changed last Thursday when the state’s Supreme Court issued its decision in 
The policyholder had contracted for the construction for a parking garage adjacent to a performing arts center in Kansas City, and the project included the installation of a 50’ high concrete retaining wall between the structure and an adjacent limestone rock face. The original design called for up to 18” of concrete slurry to be poured between the wall and the limestone embankment, but, at the general contractor’s insistence, it was modified to permit up to 36” of the fill material to be installed. While the slurry was being pumped in place, the wall cracked and failed, and it was uncontested that the change to 36” of fill was a design defect.
The policyholders owned a home with a detached garage in Alpine, Arizona. Beginning on May 29, 2011, eastern parts of the state and western New Mexico were devastated by a massive blaze known as the Wallow Fire – we published a post about an Arizona district court decision concerning business interruption loss that stemmed from that conflagration last month. The fire consumed the detached garage and all of the vegetation on the nearby hillside, but it did not reach the house. On August 6, 2011, however, one month after the Wallow Fire had been contained, there was a mudslide on the hillside, and mud and runoff water from flooding destroyed the home.
Instead of contending that the “requirements in case of loss” language mandated the tapes’ production, of course, the insurer should have sought them through regular discovery and moved to compel if they weren’t forthcoming. It is hard to see how the policyholder could have resisted that motion given her allegations of bad faith.