I just went to a home a few days ago where this came up again. It happened to be a rental property and the renter did have insurance for the personal content items damaged by the backup but the property owner did not have any coverage for the structure. This was a small backup but it did come in contact with some walls and carpet. The cost for clean up and build back will be about $5000.00. This amount does not include contents and was a small backup.

On average I always recommend a minimum of 10-15k of coverage for sewage backups. However, this amount could be very inadequate if you have a finished basement. I have seen finished basements that could easily get away with 10-15k of coverage and I have seen others that should have 100k worth of coverage and more.

On average it seems most policies have about 5k worth of coverage. This would be ok if most people kept little to no contents in their basements and if the basement was just concrete walls and floor and nothing else. However, most people store items in the basement and a lot of people have varying degrees of finished basements.

Awhile back I posted a few videos on my website regarding our services. One of the videos I posted was about insurance coverage and specifically sewer backups. It is the 3rd video on my website www.1-800fasthelp.com.

If there is anything else that I could do that would be helpful to you in making sure all your clients purchase enough sewer backup coverage, please let me know.

Time Away from the House:

We take vacations in the winter. We leave to visit family and friends during the holidays. We are not around to make sure everything is going ok with this multitude of workings systems we call a house.

We dial down the temperature a bit more not realizing that turning the temp down to 58 degrees was just enough to let that water pipe in the wall reach 30 degrees and freeze and burst because there was no way to know that there wasn’t enough insulation to prevent that from happening. We now walk into a flooded house after coming home exhausted from our trip.

Whenever leaving the house for a few days we should always shut the water off and drain the pipes. Even when it is not winter time. I can’t tell you how many jobs I would not have gone to if the homeowner did just that. If every homeowner followed this it would obviously decrease business for restoration contractors such as myself but this newsletter is for the insurance agents and lower claim volume means happier agents because of happier clients.

House Guests:

Some of us will be having friends and family over to stay with us for awhile. This is a change in our usage of normal home systems such as electrical, plumbing etc. You could be having grand children or friend over with children. Besides the very small chance that a child shoves a random object in a toilet and it causes a sewer back up or toilet overflow, you have these things called baby wipes.

Baby wipes or wet wipes do not break down like toilet paper and the can get stuck in bends and rough patches of pipes.

Other things that can get stuck are certain female products. Talk to a Roto Rooter employee and they will tell you that Baby Wipes and female product are the top thing that cause back ups and clogs.

Some people might have been flushing female products and baby wipes down their toilets for years and never had a problem. However not all plumbing systems are the same and for this reason it best not to take a chance.

I have run into this situation many of times. Just last week I walked into a 3000 sq ft condo with water several inches deep because a house guest flushed a female product down the toilet. It clogged and the water never shut off and 100’s of gallons of water poured into the home.

As always we look forward to your responses and questions.

Sincerely,
Ronnie Jones
1 800 FAST HELP

Out of all the reviews we have, not a single one is negative, they are all over-the-top positive. You can rest assured that any referral to us will be will be well taken care of. We have a history of nothing less.

If you have an insured that has any kind of water related damages, it is always a good idea to call out 1 800 FAST HELP. Sometimes there is no way to know if a dry out is needed without a trained technician looking at a situation with the proper equipment. It costs nothing to call 1 800 FAST HELP out to a house to inspect for wetness or contamination issues.

1 800 FAST HELP received a call on a Saturday.  The homeowner had discovered a leak in his bathroom. When we arrived, the homeowner had fixed the leak himself in the bathroom. It was a small leak with very little water damage. The homeowner had a wife and son. His main concern was with mold. He explained that his wife and son had seen a doctor recently and the doctor was asking him if there were any wet or moist areas of the house. The doctor suspected that Mold or some other Microbial Growth was to blame. The homeowner went on to explain that he had a previous leak in this bathroom a few years ago. He called in a plumber to fix the problem, which he did, and then he made a claim with his insurance company. The insurance company sent out an Adjuster to look at the damages and the Adjuster wrote an estimate for any drywall repairs that were needed. (Drywall repairs were needed because the plumber had to demo some drywall in order to affect his repairs.) The adjuster also paid the plumber’s bill. That was the end of that claim.

The problem was that no one checked to see if there was any wetness under the bathroom floor or drywall. A dry out may have been needed to be done. The result is that some Mold may have grown and was never discovered. Mold needs three primary things to live and grow. It needs water, a food source and the correct temperature. The new leak may have given the Mold the wetness it needed to thrive. Since the homeowner’s doctor suspected some Mold in the house and the fact that there may have been old Mold spores under the bathroom floor, we put an AFD (Air Filtration Device) in this homeowner’s home to clean the air.  To make matters worse, the homeowner’s son is Autistic. In this situation, we didn’t want to take any chances and so the AFD was put in. The homeowner made another claim and this time, his entire bathroom floor, parts of the subfloor and tub were tour out by his contractor, Anderson Building Company. The Adjuster wasn’t really to blame for not checking to see if a dry out was needed from the first claim. He paid for any damages he saw. Adjusters have a tough job and it’s not possible for them to catch everything that needs to be done because they are not specialists. On the second claim, it was the same Adjuster as from the first loss. This time he paid for the AFD and extensive repairs that were needed in the bathroom. He was able to do this because he had data from two specialists as to what needed to be done, the Contractor (Anderson Building Company) and the Mitigation Company (1 800 FAST HELP.) In this way, anything that needed to be done did get done.

I know that we have given this advice in previous issues, but we keep running into this situation time and time again. Many homeowners have small policy limits on Sump Pump failures/Sewer back-ups. Your clients need plenty of coverage in these areas because these situations happen more times than you would think. When you have a finished basement, it is even more important that your clients have adequate coverage.

When I started becoming more educated on insurance coverages and claims I started spending more on insurance. I have seen so many times when a homeowner has had plenty of coverage and every time it is a very smooth process.

I have also seen plenty of times when a homeowner doesn’t have enough coverage and nobody wins, not the agent, not the contractor and definitely not the policy holder.

1 800 FAST HELP received a call to a house on a Friday evening.  The sump pump had failed and the basement was soaked with water from one end of the basement to the other. Square footage wise, about 50% of this house had been affected by this water loss. This was no small dry out. This was a finished basement and the water began to soak up the walls. The inner framing and insulation of the walls were soaked with water and had to be dried to avoid any Mold or Microbial Growth from occurring. The homeowner was in the process of selling her house and was eager to quickly get the dry out done so she could quickly put her house back on the market. In this situation, most Water Mitigation Companies would have cut out her drywall about two feet high and removed the wet insulation. This would be done to get access to the inner framing so that this framing could be dried by conventional dry out methods. We opted to use a better, more thorough and cost effective method of drying called heat drying. This is done by heating up the temperature of the drying chamber to around 100 to 120 degrees and also by applying direct heat to the walls that are the most wet using Infrared Heaters. This system heats up all layers of materials behind a wall which causes the water in those materials to evaporate. The end result is a wall that is drier than before the loss even occurred. This system is the best way to ensure that Microbial Growth or Mold Growth does not occur. Moreover, this system allowed us to dry out the customer’s home with almost no demolition needed. This turned out to be very good because when we first arrived the homeowner told us to do whatever we needed to do as this situation “was covered by insurance”, but it was later discovered that she had a $10,000.00 policy limit on sump pump backups. While this amount is more than enough to cover Mitigation Costs, it was not enough to cover the other costs associated to the claim. Even though we needed to do almost no demolition, the homeowner still needed to replace all of her carpet pad in the basement and there were still some incidentals like re-attaching baseboards and touch up painting. This homeowner did not have enough coverage to cover both the Mitigation Costs and the Construction Cost of this claim. When it was all said and done the total for the full dry out of the structure and replacement of all carpet pad and incidentals in the basement came in around $12,000.00. This is a significant cost savings over other conventional drying methods. Had a more conventional drying method been used where a fair amount of demolition was done the reconstruction costs alone would have been well above $15,000.00. The total claim in that situation would have been well over $20,000.00. In this particular case. This is an $8,000 difference depending on the drying method used. That’s pretty substantial. Imagine if the homeowner was left with this bill? Thankfully, this homeowner wasn’t.

1 800 FAST HELP received a call recently regarding a leak from a 2^nd story condo that was flooding the ground level unit in west county. When we got there the bottom unit condo had water raining from the ceiling. The upper unit condo had water pooling in the kitchen. We did the water mitigation for both homeowners and because this was not the first time this occurred where water leaked down to the bottom unit, the owner of the bottom unit (Homeowner #1) was very upset. Arguments broke out and attorneys were threatened. We were able to get them settled down and we all agreed to call a plumber to find out just where the leak was coming from. We called Matco Plumbing, a plumber that we work with often and he came out in around an hour. The culprit: A loose valve on upper unit’s (Homeowner #2) dishwasher.

We got the call around 11:30am and were there around noon. After getting the plumber, doing all the necessary tear out, taking all our readings and then setting up our equipment it was 3:15 am. The kitchens in both units had to have their cabinets removed and set aside. On the tops of the upper cabinets in the bottom condo unit we could see a small calcium/lime build up indicative of a slow leak from the upper unit.

Homeowner #1’s insurance company (Ins Co #1) advised them not to file a claim because they would have a claim against them and have to spring for the deductible until such a time where the Homeowner #2’s insurance company (Ins Co #2) would make a judgment and pay for the claim. Ins Co #2 actually had 2 claims opened up, one for the damage done to Homeowner #2’s property and a second liability claim for the damage done to Homeowner #1’s property.

We met with the adjuster from Ins Co #2 and walked him through both units. At that point in time this adjuster was taking the necessary documentation needed as he thought he was paying for both claims. However, for Ins Co #2 to make a final decision they would need to ship the dishwasher off to a 3^rd party laboratory to verify the reason for the dishwasher malfunction and possibly subrogate back to the dishwasher manufacturer.

It was taking weeks to figure out just how this was all getting paid for, and Homeowner #1 was living without a kitchen and missing walls and ceilings in certain parts of their home. Weeks with no firm decision, Homeowner #1 finally hired an attorney. We were very on top of everything because we had finished all our work weeks prior and still had no idea who was going to pay our bill. Homeowner #1 decided that they were just going to go through with making a claim on their insurance to get them to cover the damages on their property and just subrogate back to Ins Co #2. The thought was that they would eventually get their deductible back, but most importantly they could get their home put back together.

The problem with Homeowner #1 filing a claim was that they only had $21,000 in coverage on their structure and our bill and Anderson Building Company’s reconstruction cost came in at $26,000. At first no one believed that they only had this much coverage but it was confirmed with their agent and reconfirmed again with the claims department that the $21k was supposed to cover both the mitigation and reconstruction costs. Why was this homeowner so under-insured?

So now we really had to wait for Ins Co #2 to make their decision after they got back the data on the dishwasher malfunction.

It wasn’t till 5 weeks after the day of the loss that I got a call from the condo association’s insurance company (Ins Co #3) and the adjuster tells me that he will be paying my bill and covering the claim in full. I asked why and he tells me that the way the condo bylaws are written the condo association is responsible for all the property as it existed from original construction. The unit owners are only responsible for the difference in costs for any upgrades they make in the unit. The Homeowner #1 wasn’t under-insured after all.