By Samantha Wright
The dramatic decline of production in the oil and gas industry over the past year has sent ripples throughout the insurance marketplace.
But the slowdown doesn’t mean companies are throwing their environmental coverage out the window to save money, said Stacy Brown, President of Freberg Environmental, Inc., a Denver-based insurance program manager that specializes in developing, marketing and underwriting environmental insurance programs.
“Some of these guys have been in business for 15 or 20 years, and they don’t want to lose their retroactive date,” Brown explained. “They are savvy enough to know they need to keep coverage in place to maintain continuous coverage on their professional liability or pollution coverage.”
Another coverage issue that came to the forefront over the past year grew out of the Ebola scare. During the height of the epidemic, as fear of Ebola infections spread to developed economies, U.S. and British insurance companies began specifically excluding the Ebola virus from their standard policies as an organic pathogen.
As word got out that the virus could be specifically excluded, it sent a lot of people scrambling to find out whether they had coverage, said Garick Zillgitt, Senior Vice President Environmental at Rockhill Insurance Group of Kansas City.
The exclusion impacted not only hospitals, event organizers and other businesses vulnerable to local disruptions, but also the contractors going in to clean and sterilize a potentially contaminated apartment.
The upshot? Relevant insurance policies need to be reviewed to see how they would respond to specific loss scenarios, Zillgitt advises. “Certain contractors pollution liability policies extend coverage to virus and organic pathogen coverage (often contained within the mold coverage grant), while others do not,” he said. And when it comes to risks that may have Ebola-like loss scenarios, “Purchasing coverage that extends to organic pathogens and viruses is likely worth the premium.”
