The judges don’t have a clue how much a bloated body can spew. I’ve seen a few cows and wildlife bloated. Disturbing them is a very bad idea. It literally can explode and spew over a small room.
I’m surprised a basic homeowner’s policy wouldn’t cover this damage. It’s fluid leakage from the upstairs apartment. No different than a tub overflowing or an upstairs fire. It’s property damage.
Have to give the homeowner credit for thinking outside the box.
Sounds like this woman had a very bad neighbor.
solution is if you find a bloated body on your property then you should stick a fire cracker in it.
The article really should have indicated this won’t just be a cleanup. I could see them stripping the walls back to the studs. They’ll probably have to take out hardwood flooring and the subfloor. That plywood will be contaminated.
This would like a home after a flood and mold has set in. Its all got to get ripped out. Otherwise the smell will be there a long, long time.
While I might agree that “explosion” coverage might not include bloated bodies, I think this is an example of bad policy handling by the insurance company. How many cases like this do they have to handle per year? If I were an executive in the insurance company, I’d say, “Pay the damn claim and write it off. The claim plus the cost of a trial isn’t worth the adverse publicity; the cost is peanuts to us.”
It’s corporate policies like this that give corporations a bad name. It would have been much cheaper just to pay up and forget it.
I thought the same thing. Write it off as normal property damage. It’s a no win situation for the Insurance company to fight this in court and get the bad publicity.
State Farm is still trying to recover from the bad publicity after Katrina. There are dozens of stories on Google (search for state farm katrina lawsuit). Some from just last year. The litigation has dragged on over seven years.
I’ve heard of ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ before but…
[Quote=Courthouse News]
Maintenance men forced open her apartment door and found her body almost two weeks after the presumed time of death. Her puppy was picking at the corpse, the neighbor said.
“I don’t know how the dog stayed alive. It must have been at her for some time,” Colangelo said.
[/quote]
The insurance company would have a really easy time denying your claim after you’re charged with arson/detonating a bomb/willful destruction of property.
I had car insurance with State Farm from when I first got my license. Some 10 years later, they decided to cut back their presence in NJ, and dropped me(along with many others) for no reason except to reduce their exposure in a state that they felt had rules and regulations they didn’t like. Screw State Farm, they suck.
" Like a good neighbor, we’re rotten".
I don’t think explode is the wrong word for what happens to this whale at all.
I had to click the gif link to get it to work.
Even a proportionally scaled down event of that nature should be covered.
You want to know what’s really sad in this story?
Some poor old lady’s death went unnoticed for two weeks. It seems she had nobody close enough, family or friends, to keep in touch.
That sure puts our pimple/boil threads to shame.
Outliving family and dying alone has always been a fear of mine.
I call my mom every morning to briefly chat and make sure shes ok. She’s 81 and I worry about her.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/11/24/The_Case_of_the_Exploding_Corpse.htm
Sounds to me like the insurance company bought themselves some very good judges. (Good for the insurance companies that is.)
Read the article a bit closer
She didn’t own a home she had an apartment with a renters policy.
Renters policies only cover named perils decomposing bodies not being one of them.
State Farm apparently made an offer of coverage which she rejected wanting more.
It sounds like (not sure article isn’t real clear) that she wanted State Farm to remediate the smell in the building itself, which apparently she does not own, has no insurable interest in, and is named as an exclusion in her renter’s policy.
I don’t blame SF for whipping her ass in court.
I’m somewhat amazed that a woman who dies of old age had the optimistic viewpoint to get a puppy. Exactly how long did she think she had left?