Let’s assume the blaze was accidental (or at least is ruled that way).
What I’m wondering is - let’s say the fire burns the place to the ground. Then, a day later, a flood would have destroyed the bottom 5 feet of the place (basically ruining half the first floor).
How would this affect the insurance company’s liability? Do they have to pay to repair the things that were destroyed by fire but would have been destroyed by flood a day later?
I’m having a vision of an insurance company that denies all claims because your home (along with the earth) will be consumed by the sun in 7 billion years.
I’m reasonably sure that all the damage caused by the fire will be covered.
Provided you can prove it. Don’t expect them or the fire brigade to do any forensic research on the remains of your house - and I have no idea whether anything to prove there was a fire before the flood would survive.
The flood after the fire scenario would have no bearing on this claim because the flood caused no loss to an already destroyed structure.
“The next one burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp…
So we built again.”
The insurance company pays to repair/replace covered damages, there’s not a ‘well this is covered damage that happened but a later event might would have done uncovered damage so it’s not covered’ rule anywhere. If your no-flood-insurance house burns down just before a flood they might investigate more than usual to make sure there’s no fraud, but in that case they’re looking for ‘you started the fire so it’s not covered’ rather than ‘later damage makes earlier damage uncovered’.
Wouldn’t the fire department have responded to the fire when it occurred (that is, the day before the flood)? So there would a record that the fire preceded the flood. And if any paper records were damaged in the flood, they could simply ask the fire fighters.
They’d probably have to pay. Although they might well try to weasel.
Some problems:
A) most house fires don’t destroy the house. They damage part of it. Theyir liability is limited to fixing what burned, not anything more.
B) in the normal course, the insurance company representative shows up a couple days after the fire to assay the damage.
It’s easy enough for them to assess the structural damage. But as to contents, including high cost/sf built-ins like kitchens and luxo bathrooms it’s much more complicated. This is where you need to have a pre-fire inventory of every single object that was damaged or destroyed with proof of purchase or replacement cost. Otherwise too bad; so sad. “That was a price Steinway! Not anymore.”
So what happens if the flood hits before the adjuster can visit the fire damage? What happens when your records of your contents are lost in the flood waters?
The answer is the insurance company is in a position to offer very, very little. Your counter-option is to sue them over it.
All in all, not a strong place for you to be.
I agree that the flood might remove evidence that you need to prove damages, but the problem then isn’t ‘the flood later damaged the house so the insurance company isn’t liable for existing damage’ but ‘the flood destroyed the evidence you’d need to prove damages to the insurance company’. That could happen even with two covered events, for example if a fire damages the structure of the house and a wind storm blows away the records you’d use to prove that you owned expensive stuff.
If you’ve assembled records of the value of your home and its contents for insurance purposes, why would you keep the only copy of them in that house (especially when it would be easy enough to store digital copies of that documentation online someplace).