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 Queen Anne Park Homeowners Ass’n v. State Farm Fire & Cas. Co., 2015 WL 3795796, 2015 Wash. LEXIS 695 (Wash., Jun. 18, 2015). The court found that the term, as used in the insurance policy before it, was ambiguous. It then adopted a definition of “collapse,” but its use of uncertain terms in that definition may only lead to further ambiguity, and the likely result will be yet more expensive litigation concerning older policies that contain similar “collapse” language. The Queen Anne…
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Ninth Circuit: Under Arizona Law Mudslide Can Be Covered as the Direct Result of Fire
Last Friday, a unanimous panel of the Ninth Circuit held that loss from the excluded peril of mudslide occurring one month after a wildfire could be covered as the “direct” result of the blaze. In Stankova v. Metropolitan Prop. & Cas. Ins. Co., 2015 WL 3429395, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 8935 (9th Cir., May 29, 2015), it reached that result even though Arizona has not adopted the efficient proximate cause rule, saying that it did not need to apply that doctrine to determine that the mudslide “could have been directly and proximately caused by the wildfire.” It also blithely ignored anti-concurrent causation (ACC) language, which is given effect in Arizona, as “inconsistent with Arizona’s standard fire insurance policy, which insures…
Tagged with: Arizona, Ninth Circuit
Posted in Anti-Concurrent Causation, Causation, Direct Physical Loss or Damage, Efficient Proximate Cause, Exclusions, Flood, Mudslide, Wildfire
Posted in Anti-Concurrent Causation, Causation, Direct Physical Loss or Damage, Efficient Proximate Cause, Exclusions, Flood, Mudslide, Wildfire
