Plumbing Leak Insurance Claims: Save the damaged part!
If you have damage from a plumbing leak, keep the failed plumbing part from the repair
Plumbing leaks happen, and they cause damage. If you find yourself in that situation, your first instinct is never your impending insurance claim, it’s that there’s water everywhere, causing damage and you need it to stop.
Your insurance policy is a contract; a legal document. It requires you to perform certain actions, and when there’s a plumbing leak and water damage, it may seem like those actions are at odds with one another. You have to protect the property from further damage, mitigate the existing damages, preserve the evidence for the insurance company to inspect, and make sure not to prejudice the insurance company’s investigation.
Here’s how to balance all of those duties under your insurance policy:
Protect the property from further damage
If you’ve found water on your floor, you have to quickly diagnose the problem. There may be massive amounts of clean water coming from a supply line or a pressurized plumbing line causing damage. If that’s the case, turn off the main shutoff valve, typically found outside your home. Once the water supply is shut off, the ongoing damage will have stopped and you have time to call a plumber.
If you don’t know where the main water shutoff is, you might have no choice but to call a plumber while the water continues to leak and cause damage. Your insurance company may try to use this against you, depending on how extensive the water damages are. A diligent homeowner should find out where their water shut off is in advance of a problem like this.
If the water damage isn’t being caused by a supply line or other pressurized plumbing, it’s either being caused by a broken cast iron drain line, or other waste/sanitary plumbing, or an appliance, like a washing machine or dishwasher.
If the water on the floor causing damage is dirty or smells badly, it is likely coming from a broken cast iron drain line or appliance that carries dirty water. In that case, stop all appliances using water and refrain from using your showers and toilets until a handyman or plumber has been able to figure out what the problem is.
Once you’ve stopped the flow of water, take pictures. Take lots of pictures and document the conditions before any repair or other effort has started. Your insurance company requires that you document damages and now might be the best opportunity to preserve the conditions as they exist at the time of the leak.
Mitigate the existing damages
You’ve successfully stopped the supply of water that’s causing damage in your home, and at this point you may be waiting for a plumber, but you still have water that is soaking into the porous building materials in your home. Water is being absorbed by drywall, particle board, plywood, cabinets, vanities, laminate flooring or wood flooring, or even being absorbed into grout and mortar beneath your tile flooring. It could be clean water that causes staining and other damages, or it could be dirty water or sewage that requires special types of repair due to health and safety issues.
There is already some damage, but you can prevent it from getting worse. You can start yourself by using towels to soak up the water, and a shop vac if you have one, or a mop and bucket. Work on getting as much of the standing water up as possible. If you have more than one pair of hands, have someone take pictures of this process as well. If your towels are damaged cleaning up dirty water, you can claim these as part of your insurance claim.
Once you have a good handle on cleaning up the standing water, point some fans towards wet areas if you have them to help dry the damaged materials.
The reason you want to clean up water as best you can is because in as little as 48 hours, under the right conditions, mold can begin to form and spread, posing a health risk to you and your family. Most insurance policies also cap mold damages at a relatively low amount, and preventing the spread and growth of mold can save you potentially huge out of pocket expenses.
Water mitigation contractors
Depending on how much damage has been caused by the plumbing leak, and the type of water, you may also want to get in a special type of contractor that specializes in water mitigation.
This water mitigation contractor will have been trained in water clean up, both clean water and dirty water. We caution you again to take pictures before they start because this is when things can start to move quickly and get you in trouble with your insurance company.
Water mitigation contractors may cut holes in building materials like cabinets and drywall to assist fans in drying areas of damage, or have larger machines that extract water from inside wall cavities or other areas. These contractors may also remove significant areas of drywall, remove damaged cabinets, or other damaged materials. If at all possible, take photographs and ask that these materials not be discarded.
Your insurance policy requires that you show damaged items to the insurance company, and if, in their haste, a water mitigation contractor throws all this stuff away and there are no photographs, the insurance company may never know what was damaged, giving them grounds to deny your claim.
If you have a garage, keep the damaged materials there. If not, a storage shed, or outside protected from the elements as best as you can.
Preserve the evidence for the insurance company to inspect
In addition to requesting the water mitigation contractor to keep the damaged building materials (drywall, cabinets, etc.), the most important thing you can do is to save the failed plumbing part. As much as it is possible, save the damaged plumbing part.
If a supply line burst, get the broken copper pipe, or other plumbing material and keep it somewhere safe. The insurance company will want to verify what happened, and how. They may analyze it later in more detail or have an engineer verify that it is consistent with an accident and wasn’t purposely cut, or that there wasn’t some other type of insurance fraud.
If an appliance fails, keep the appliance somewhere it can be accessed. VIP Adjusting’s founder had an insurance claim related to a broken valve on a dishwasher. Six months later, the insurance company came and took the entire dishwasher to be kept as evidence while they pursued what’s called “subrogation” for indemnification against the dishwasher’s manufacturer.
The hardest failed plumbing part to save is a broken cast iron drain line. When cast iron plumbing fails, it becomes very brittle, and in order to get to it, you often have to dig a trench in the slab that can damage the cast iron line even further.
In this situation of damage caused by a cast iron drain line, it’s best to leave the line in place and let the insurance company do as much investigation as they want before you undertake any repair, as the alternative is very risky.
If you must proceed in addressing a cast iron drain line, first have a licensed plumber with a camera run it through the line and document by video all breaks in the line and mark them in the house with tape. Make sure you have a copy of this video before you do anything else.
In proceeding from there, when the floor is trenched, take photo or video of the area to prove it is the same area as the break from your video and get as much documentation of the broken cast iron plumbing as possible. If the cast iron line can be removed in a large piece, save it!
Don’t prejudice the insurance company’s investigation
This post is a very methodical description of what is an otherwise chaotic situation. You’ve had water damage your home. Your life has been turned upside down. You’ve spent money on plumbers and other contractors. You may have been unable to use some or all of your home’s plumbing system in the meantime. You might have had to move out of the home because the plumbing will be unusable for an extended period, or because the damage is too great. The last thing on your mind is your insurance claim, but it’s our first concern.
If you have done anything that allows the insurance company to question whether the loss happened exactly as you say, the insurance company can deny your claim outright, and they may be justified in doing so.
If you had water damage from a burst copper pipe and the plumber cut a hole in the wall, cut out a section of pipe that’s damaged and installs a new piece, but the broken pipe is discarded, how can the insurance company be sure someone didn’t spray the walls with a hose to try to get some money? This is why you need to preserve your evidence by saving the damaged plumbing parts.
Maybe you had a water mitigation contractor come in to perform drying services, and they did such a good job removing wet materials, there’s no evidence of damage remaining. How will the insurance company know there was any damage at all and a shady contractor didn’t just come in and cut out drywall to fake an insurance claim?
The scariest scenario is that you’ve had a failed cast iron drain line and can no longer prove it. Often times, between the trenching, flooring repairs, and significant areas of renovation required, these repairs of failed cast iron drain lines can exceed six-figures. If you can’t prove what happened in great detail, the insurance company may try to claim that even though you may have needed to replace this line, there is no coverage because there was no leak! We’ve seen it happen, and instead of getting fairly paid for your claim, a homeowner like this would be facing an uphill battle right from the start at a risk of not receiving a fair reimbursement for their claim.
A cautionary tale of a plumbing leak
One of the most absurd claims we’ve ever handled was for a homeowner that was very handy. In fact, the homeowner was an air conditioning repair man. He had owned a home for barely two weeks and upon arriving home from work discovered water pouring out of a light fixture in his kitchen, with the water originating from the second floor of his home.
Being as handy as he was, the homeowner turned off the water and waited for help from a friend while he cleaned up some of the water on his own. The water was clean, so he knew it was a broken supply line somewhere in his home.
Once he had his friend to help him, the friend turned on the water supply and the homeowner quickly realized the water was coming from a broken plastic tube from the wall to a toilet. He turned off the water to that toilet and localized the problem.
Now, here’s where our homeowner got himself into trouble. These plastic lines are brittle and break all the time, so he didn’t think it was a big deal. He went to a big-box hardware store, bought a nicer braided metal replacement in cash for about $5, replaced it, and threw the broken plastic one away.
The insurance company came to the home, couldn’t inspect the broken plastic plumbing to the toilet and sent an engineer to the property to assist them in denying the claim. The engineer, a paid shill from the insurance company said that even though the homeowner had owned the home less than a month, the big stain on the ceiling of his kitchen and damage to his kitchen cabinets was the result of years of water from people getting in and out of the shower in that upstairs bathroom, and dripping on the floor!
Because our client thought nothing of his insurance claim when he fixed the problem, he ended up having to proceed with several years worth of litigation in order to get paid for his claim.
VIP Adjusting’s public adjusters have seen all kinds of plumbing leak damage over the years and make sure to approach the situation from the perspective of your insurance claim, your potential recovery, and preservation in the event of litigation. If you’ve had water damage as a result of a plumbing leak, contact VIP Adjusting today so they can guide you through the claims process and assist you in documenting your damages and the conditions at your home.
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