Environmental Contamination
Christopher Yetka is the Chair of Larkin Hoffman’s Insurance Recovery and Advice Practice Group, based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a Fellow of the American College of Coverage Counsel, and a former Chair of the Insurance Coverage Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association.
State environmental agencies are still finding long-hidden contamination at utility sites around the country. Those claims can relate to operations that ceased decades or even a hundred years in the past. Paying for the clean-up can be a significant burden for the utilities and their customers.
In Part I, we described how to go about searching for your historic insurance policies, including tips on how to find old information that is not easily accessible. We also discussed the emergence of the pollution exclusions in those policies in the 1970s and 1980s which limited available coverage after that time. This article will discuss how old insurance policies, once found, may be used to defray the cost of cleanup.
Commercial Liability Insurance: Accidents are Different than Events
There is a long history to commercial liability policy forms that would be impossible to cover in this article. However, generally speaking, insurance policies for this type of coverage used occurrence forms. These forms covered the policyholder whenever a claim came in, even after the policy period ended, so long as the occurrence — as defined in the policy — happened during the policy period.