As the months here on Slabbed slip away I am sometimes reminded of Yogi Berra and his famous quote, “It’s like déjà vu all over again”. For instance Nowdy’s excellent post this morning on Perrien in Louisiana was the product of internal discussion last night, a case I wrote and evidently promptly forgot about. Luckily one of us had a memory last night.
There is a case ongoing in the Western District of Louisiana that I happened to remember involving the Cameron Parish School Board. In my younger days I worked offshore summers to pay for college and I suspect the tiny town of Cameron stuck with me because of the hole in the wall place off the main road that made the best boudin bar none. In that case against State Farm, the Cameron Parish School Board sued because they were underinsured for flood. That case was thrown out, I believe correctly because it is the insured responsibility to fully insure their assets.
The thing I thought made the case oddball was Cameron Parish buying commerical flood insurance from State Farm. I was later emailed that State Farm does sell commerical flood insurance but does not sell excess flood which did cause problems later on with underinsured claims. What the slabbed need to know is you’ll still need an independent agent if you need more coverage than the NFIP limits and don’t depend on your State Farm agent to tell you that, their economic self interest dictates the last thing they want is another agent selling you insurance, especially if you are wealthy enough to own a piece of property that would require excess flood coverage.
The new case involving the Cameron Parish School Board is very interesting for another reason, the federal district court judge cited Leonard and Tuepker in a ruling where he reversed himself. Sound straightforward? Not really and Insurance Law Hawaii tells us why:
Although it had previously found a policy’s anti-concurrent causation clause to be ambiguous, a Louisiana federal district court reversed itself in Cameron Parish School Bd. v. RSUI Indemn. Co., 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 64902 (W.D. La. Aug. 25, 2008). Continue reading “Fallout from Leonard and Tuepker Continues in an Unlikely Place”
