Risk & Business

Image via Wikipedia Due to Congress adjourning April 12 th without extending the National Flood Insurance Program , NFIP , the flood insurance program's authority to write new policies expired after midnight on March 28 th . It seems the agreement to continue the program was attached to legislation pertaining to unemployment benefits , which was blocked in the Senate from being voted on. As of right now, if you are pending the closing of a mortgage related to the purchase of real estate requiring flood coverage you are out of luck. This same situation occurred at the end of February and the program was closed until renewed by Congress on 3/2. Hopefully Congress will act on this quickly and reinstate the program retroactively to the current expiration date.

Image by gullevek via Flickr Something that insureds should be aware of, contractors in particular since this practice is widespread in their industry, is the fact that Additional Insured endorsements can often reduce the actual coverage available to them, the actual Named Insured. In a recent article in The Insurance Journal, Chris Boggs , the author , sited the case of a large construction company that required one of it's subcontractor 's to add them as an additional insured to the sub's general liability policy. Subsequently, the subcontractor hired another subcontractor to complete some of it's responsibilities. This is where it gets hairy. The subcontractor hired by the original subcontractor had an employee injured on the site by another contractor, also hired directly the the large construction company. The employee's company filed suit against all parties, the main contractor and also the subcontractors involved in the event, either directly or i...