What happened: A federal appeals court ruled Liberty Mutual has no duty to defend three highway contractors in dozens of lawsuits arising from a deadly 130-vehicle pileup, because the claims target road maintenance failures - not construction defects.
Who's involved: Liberty Mutual Fire Insurance Company (insurer) vs. North Tarrant Infrastructure, Ferrovial Construction US, and Webber (highway contractors).
What's at stake: The duty to defend the contractors in dozens of bodily-injury lawsuits tied to a February 2021 pileup that killed six people.
Why it matters: The ruling draws a sharp line between completed-operations coverage and post-construction maintenance liability.
Where it stands: Affirmed by the Fifth Circuit on October 27, 2026. Summary judgment for Liberty Mutual stands.
A 130-vehicle pileup on an icy Texas highway killed six people - and the coverage fight that followed just drew a hard line between building a road and keeping it safe.
The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled on October 27, 2026, that Liberty Mutual Fire Insurance Company does not have to defend three contractors in dozens of bodily-injury lawsuits stemming from the February 11, 2021, disaster on I-35W in Fort Worth.
The contractors - North Tarrant Infrastructure (NTI), Ferrovial Construction US Corporation, and Webber - rebuilt and expanded a stretch of I-35W known as Segment 3A between 2013 and 2018. Liberty Mutual insured them for injuries arising from that construction work, and initially agreed to pick up their defense in the pileup lawsuits. But several years into the litigation, the insurer went to a federal court in the Northern District of Texas and asked a judge to confirm it did not have to keep paying for the defense. The trial court agreed.
The policy covered injuries arising from the contractors' finished construction work. The pileup lawsuits alleged something different: that a group of "Roadway Defendants" - which included the contractors - had failed to "operate and maintain" the highway, failed to "properly prepare for oncoming winter weather," and failed to "constantly monitor the roadways."
The court acknowledged that the policy language and its various amendments were, in its own words, "clunky and poorly drafted." But it did not need to untangle those drafting problems. Even under the contractors' own preferred reading of the policy - which they argued should cover any injury arising from their completed work on Segment 3A - the pileup lawsuits still fell outside coverage.
None of the pileup lawsuits alleged that anything the contractors did or failed to do during construction caused the crash. The claims were about day-to-day road maintenance: keeping the surface safe in freezing conditions. The contractors had finished their work years before the accident.
The court put it plainly: the highway segment the contractors built was "merely the situs of an incident that could have occurred anywhere." The connection between their construction work and the pileup was "too remote to invoke coverage."
The contractors tried one more argument: that because the pileup happened on Segment 3A, and they built Segment 3A, that alone should be enough to trigger coverage. The court disagreed. Under the policy's completed-operations language, the injury had to arise out of the contractors' work - not simply happen on top of it.
The ruling, which is unpublished and not binding precedent, applies a well-established Texas principle: an insurer's duty to defend depends entirely on matching the policy language against what the underlying lawsuits actually allege. For anyone writing or handling completed-operations policies on infrastructure projects, the boundary is clear - construction coverage follows the work, not the geography.
