When Trees Fall...

Trees…

When the phone rings at 10:30PM and it’s one of my tenants, that is always cause for concern. “The tree in the backyard just fell on the neighbor’s house.” Hmmm…I haven’t heard that one before. My response after a few silly questions was “I’ll be right over.” I was asking things like: “Did it hit-hit the house or just land close to it?” “Was the tree originally completely in our backyard?”

John and I arrived on the scene to find water gushing from a supply line that was broken when the root ball came up. It took us several minutes to figure out that the water needed to be turned off at the meter. Really??? In hindsight, that should have been an easy one. To get the water turned off we had to borrow a wrench from the neighbor who now had a rather large tree leaning on the backend of his house. As if that weren’t enough, we also had to borrow our tenant’s crank flashlight to shed some light on the matter.

Insurance…

In case you were wondering whose home owner insurance covers what, I now have that answer. According to Farmer’s Insurance, unless willful neglect can be proven (i.e., the tree was dead and I failed to cut it down) my insurance will not cover the damage done to the neighbor’s house. The neighbor’s home insurance will cover all of the damages less his deductible because the incident is considered an “ACT OF GOD”. I am meeting with my insurance adjuster later this morning and intend to convince him that he needs to cover the entire cost of the tree removal even though most of it is on the neighbor’s property at the moment. We'll see how well that goes over...