Last month, we discussed a recent Texas Supreme Court decision that enforced an anti-concurrent causation (ACC) clause. The month of April also saw a unanimous panel on Iowa’s intermediate level appellate court do the same thing. In Salem United Methodist Church v. Church Mut. Ins. Co., 2015 WL 1546431, 2015 Iowa App. LEXIS 308 (Iowa Ct. App., Apr. 8, 2015), the judges held that ACC provisions unambiguously exclude loss caused by a concurrent combination of excluded perils and included perils and that the question of whether an excluded peril played any causative role must therefore be put to the finder of fact.
The policyholder had a church in Cedar Rapids. On June 11-12, 2008, the Cedar River overflowed its banks, and the basement of the church sustained damage from sewer backup. The insurer denied the claim, and the insured put the matter in suit. After a jury trial, the district court awarded $705,765.07 to the policyholder, and an appeal followed. Read more ›
The policyholder White Mountain owned a hospital in Springerville, Arizona. On May 29, 2011, a blaze was started by an abandoned campfire in the nearby Bear Wallow Wilderness Area. The wildfire ultimately burned 841 square miles in eastern Arizona and western New Mexico, and it led to the temporary evacuation of Springerville. Residents weren’t allowed to return until June 13th, and the hospital itself was closed until the following day.
On the TV show “Friends,” Phoebe Buffay used to entertain patrons at the Central Perk coffee shop with her song “Smelly Cat” (“Smelly cat, smelly cat, what are they feeding you, . . . “). The lyrics would have resonated with Doug and Gayle Mellin, the owners of a condominium in Epping, New Hampshire. After they moved in, the Mellins noticed a cat urine odor coming from a downstairs neighbor’s unit through an open plumbing chase in the kitchen wall. The stench was so severe that the town building inspector directed the couple to relocate temporarily and have the unit professionally remediated, but efforts to do that were unsuccessful. The policyholders vacated permanently after living there only three months.
The policyholder owned The Pointe Apartments – a complex in Galveston, Texas that was heavily damaged when Hurricane Ike came ashore on September 13, 2008. Lexington afforded the primary layer of property insurance protection under a $25 million all-risk contract of insurance that covered dozens of local apartment complexes. Wind was not an excluded peril, and Lexington paid its building consultant’s estimate ($1,278,000) for the wind damage in full.
The April 8, 2015 decision of the California Court of Appeals in 
The case was a proposed class action by a West Liberty, Kentucky dentist whose office was damaged by a tornado and an Owingsville, Kentucky homeowner whose residence was hit by a fire. In both cases, the State Farm policies afforded replacement cost coverage but authorized the carrier to make its initial payment on an ACV basis. In the two cases, the insurer calculated ACV by determining replacement costs and then depreciating both materials and labor. The policyholders argued that labor, unlike construction materials which logically age and wear and tear, was not subject to depreciation.
The policyholder had a rental property in a “relatively isolated location” that was vacated by the last tenant in February 2010. On December 20, 2011 the home was damaged by a fire. Subsequent investigation indicated that it was a “warming fire” set by a transient that got out of hand when he attempted to kick the burning firewood out the back door.
Oklahoma has experienced a remarkable rise in earthquake activity in recent years. According to the Oklahoma Geological Survey, the state had 567 quakes of Magnitude 3.0 or greater in 2014. That was a five-fold increase over 2013, a 14-fold increase over the 2008-2012 average, and a 100-fold increase over earlier years. The 2014 number exceeded the total number of earthquakes in Oklahoma during the preceding 30 years combined; no state in the lower 48 states, including California, saw more quakes last year.
Effective in 2005, Florida statutes defined “sinkhole loss” to mean “structural damage to the building, including the foundation, caused by sinkhole activity,” and they left the all-important term “structural damage” undefined. Homeowner’s policies issued in the state employed that formulation until May 17, 2011, when Florida adopted a much narrower five-part definition of structural damage that applied to policies affording coverage for sinkhole loss, and many courts construing the 2005 language held that the term “structural damage” meant nothing more than “damage to the structure.” Several weeks ago in 
The insured was a law firm with offices on John Street in lower Manhattan. On October 28, 2012, the Mayor of New York City issued an executive order evacuating all homes and business located in the area. Superstorm Sandy made landfall the next day, and parts of lower Manhattan – though not the area around the policyholder’s offices – quickly experienced “never-before-seen flood levels.” On October 31st, a second executive order continued the evacuation and directed that buildings could only be reoccupied after being inspected and declared safe; 14 more orders were subsequently issued extending those restrictions. The law firm’s offices were ultimately declared available for occupancy on Christmas Eve, and the policyholder moved back in on January 4, 2013.