A View From The Press Box

Sam, thanks for opening up this great subject.

There are so many, but my favorite was when we received a call from a California FAIR Plan insured that his house had been stolen.

He would regularly visit the home--a rental--to collect the monthly rent. When he arrived the house was gone and there was nothing left but a clean and level lot. His tenant did not even call--apparently thinking the insured had a creative way to evict him.

We checked the policy, which only insured against certain named perils, none of which were theft and denied the claim.

It turned out that the city had ordered demolition of a hazardous building with the same street number, but the west end of the street and the insured's house was on the east end. The city eventually paid him for the loss due to their error.

I also dealt with a woman who was bitten by her neighbor's monkey. She claimed only $19 for a doctor's visit (this was in the early 1970s) and $1 for a bottle of peroxide.

The claim was settled quickly, and when the receipt was received, it turned out the doctor's bill was only $9, with a "1" placed in front of the "9" in a different color ink. She cheated for $10 and could have received hundreds had she asked, since liability is assumed when the injury is from a wild animal.

The most unusual was a claim that an insured's product resulted in the wrongful death of the claimant's "son" who, on investigation, turned out to be a parrokeet.

I published most of these stories in detail in my book "Heads I Win, Tails You Lose," available as an e-book at http://www.lulu.com.

Great thread. Sam. And thanks for "honoring" the tens of thousands of us adjusters.

While working for GAB in Medford, Oregon, in the early '70s, our office received a fire loss to investigate. The loss was to two large boathouses used to store tour boats on a large lake in Oregon.

Simple enough, except that the boathouses were located inside a volcano!

We headed for Crater Lake--a dormant volcano near Medford, to see what had happened. Sure enough, smoke was still rolling from Wizard Island, located in the center of the lake!

A tourist, smoking on the island, had dropped her cigarette into the pine needles on the tree-laden and volcanic-ashe-covered island. The boathouses burned along with several trees, and since the ashe was porous, the fire was still burning beneath the surface!

We pondered how to rebuild the boathouses. The fire occurred in July, but the first snows would fall in September, and without the protection of the boathouses, the weight of the snow would crush the boats.

The original structures were built in the early 1900s during the summer months, but at that time the building materials were cascaded down the vertical walls of the volcano during the previous winter and slid across the ice to the island.

After working with a design team, the insured hired a manufactured home business in Medford to build the A-Frame style boathouses in sections.

We then hired Columbia Helicopter, a logging helicopter business out of Portland, Oregon, to transport the sections from a parking lot on the rim to the island below.

When the sections were completed, the transport was scheduled for a Sunday morning in August. Due to the high elevation and temperature, the copter could only load fuel for one trip to the island and back, or it would lose its lift.

The event was quite an attraction, drawing a large crowd at the Crater Lake Hotel. The smoke from the still burning island created visual vortexs with the copter twin whirling rotors, creating an unforgetable photo image of the process.

I doubt that any other claims office can boast of adjusting a fire loss in the throat of a volcano!