Viewing 40 posts - 1 through 40 (of 75 total)
  • Quite an insurance claim..Liverpool car park
  • gwaelod
    Free Member

    Might be a lost no claims bonus situation.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-42529615

    Presumably the insurer of the car that caught fire initially coughs up for the lot?

    matt_outandabout
    Full Member

    Indeed – if they can pinpoint which car it was, if not it’s an everyone claim…

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Can you imagine if they identify whose car it was? Renewal time will be fun.

    So Mr Smith, have you had any claims in past five years?

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    bruneep
    Full Member

    Sky news saying landrover on 3rd floor

    It’s the fire report I wouldn’t want to do. <Enter Car reg/ vin number > tap tap tap “not known ×1400”

    benw
    Free Member

    Number of vehicles involved set to rise significantly

    neverownenoughbikes
    Free Member

    I remember getting a car on fire parked at the top of a hill. Just as we arrived the fuel tank ruptured and burning fuel proceeded to light up the 5 cars parked behind it. I thought that was bad, 1400, **** that!!

    paulosoxo
    Free Member

    Sky news saying landrover on 3rd floor

    Car park Cludo?

    Rockhopper
    Free Member

    I think you claim off your own insurance in a case like this and let them fight it out later.

    wiggles
    Free Member

    I feel sorry for the people that live in the area…

    When working out their renewal how many cars were fire damaged in this area in the last year…1400!!

    but I suppose it is Liverpool so maybe not that much difference 😆

    nasher
    Free Member

    How many cars would have the same underwriter though? I guess there are only a handful?

    pk13
    Full Member

    let’s just hope it was not one of those electric ones. I wonder who the car park owner will claim off as its never going to be deemed safe again

    MSP
    Full Member

    I think most insurance policies haver a liability limit of around 2 million, 1400 cars plus other fire damage, is going to well exceed that.

    The car owner, if identified, could find himself being sued by the insurance companies.

    CountZero
    Full Member

    First I’d actually heard about this, I’ve not heard any news since yesterday teatime. Some comments are priceless, “oh, we’ll just wait and get our car back later” 😯
    I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere downwind of that without a full face mask on, that smoke has to be as toxic as hell, considering allot the materials involved.
    And removing the wreckage is going to be a long and messy job, too.
    There are going to be a lot of unhappy people having lost not only their car, but any personal possessions that may be in them.
    I was wondering about the structural integrity of the car park itself, too; heat that intense, with cold water being pumped onto the concrete is going to cause spalling, and likely other structural damage, surely their only option would be to level it and rebuild it? I can’t imagine it would be safe to just repair the damaged surfaces.

    The car owner, if identified, could find himself being sued by the insurance companies.

    On what grounds? Highly unlikely to be deliberate, unless we want to start wallowing in the murky depths of possible terrorist involvement, which I don’t want to suggest.
    Vehicle fires happen, if the car was a Zafira, which does have an unhappy past history of self-immolation, then surely it would be the manufacturers problem, not the owner.

    Alphabet
    Full Member

    We were there. Thankfully my SO has had flu over Christmas as our plan was to arrive for the evening show at lunchtime and spend the afternoon mooching around Liverpool so our car would have been in that car park. Due to her flu we only turned up at 6pm to be turned away from the car park. Lots of people still arriving on foot. We ended up double checking what was going on, that the show had been cancelled and then set off home again.

    slowster
    Free Member

    I am fairly certain that the claim for each car will be paid for by that car’s insurer, and they will not make a recovery from the insurer of the car in which the fire started. Consequently all the car owners will lose no claims discount. The fact that all those other car owners were not at fault for the fire is irrelevant: it’s a ‘no claim discount’, not a ‘no blame discount’. Similarly the insurers of the car park will not seek to recover their claim payment.

    Any attempt to make a recovery would be extremely unlikely to succeed, since it would probably be necessary to prove that there was some identifiable negligence which caused the fire (the fact that a car did catch fire is not itself evidence of negligence). There would also be a requirement to show that the damge was reasonably foreseeable, i.e. it might be reasonably foreseeable that the cars immediately next to the one that started the fire would also catch fire, but it was not reasonably foreseeable that the fire would spread to the whole car park (as evidenced by the newsworthiness of this event: this is a very unusual event and the vast majority of car park fires only involve a small number of cars).

    I was wondering about the structural integrity of the car park itself, too; heat that intense, with cold water being pumped onto the concrete is going to cause spalling, and likely other structural damage, surely their only option would be to level it and rebuild it? I can’t imagine it would be safe to just repair the damaged surfaces.

    I agree this is going to be one of the most interesting things about the fire from the perspective of the fire safety industry. My suspicion is that although the fire looked severe, the structural integrity will remain and the car park will be repairable, i.e. the fire burned quickly and intensely, but there was not enough combustible material burning for long enough and hot enough to damage the structural integrity.

    simmy
    Free Member

    According to the Echo, I was just the one car that caught fire then it spread.

    http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/ex-liverpool-captain-wife-helped-14098763

    I’m guessing the car owners won’t be able to claim to claim off the car park as most parking areas have signs saying ” we don’t accept any claims for loss or damages ” or similar.

    taxi25
    Free Member

    I think slowster has it. Everyone’s going sort their own claims out. Any particular negligence will be hard to establish.

    project
    Free Member

    Cycled past there yesterday afternoon, huge number of massive horse boxes, on the outside car parks which had their own private fire and safety vehicles patrolling the site incase of a fire, if just one of those had caught fire it would have been terrible trying to save the horses.It was the last day of the horse of the year show being put on at the arena.

    As for the actual car park, its built behind the arena and right next to a hotel one end and apartment block the other end, thankfully highly skilled fire personnel stopped the fire spreading to these buildings.

    As for the start of the fire there are pictures on the local papers website taken by an ex footballers wife showing the old land rover on fire.

    At least it was near a plentiful supply of water being surrounded by docks.

    Strange there was no fire suppression system fitted to all floors as is fitted in most underground car parks.

    bikebouy
    Free Member

    Blinking ek..

    There are plenty of people inconvenienced by a loss of car now and for the foreseeable, not everyone has extensive policies that cover temporary cars whilst the claims in progress.. and I’d say a lot of folks have families, and/or plans for travel and such, and certainly doing daily tasks like shopping that are going to be a right faff.

    They maybe cars, but the disruption is going to be long lasting.

    footflaps
    Full Member

    I’m guessing the car owners won’t be able to claim to claim off the car park as most parking areas have signs saying ” we don’t accept any claims for loss or damages ” or similar.

    Those signs are meaningless as you can’t avoid statute obligations via contract law, which is what those signs are trying to do. Having said that, I doubt they can prove the car park is liable in any way, so there is no case to answer.

    andyl
    Free Member

    It’s not just the 1400-1600 cars ont he claim though.

    The structure is now unsafe and will most likely have to be demolished and rebuilt.
    Loss of earnings for the car park owners and potentially the arena owners if events have to be cancelled.
    Potential loss of jobs for the car park attendants.
    Emergency accommodation for all the horses and the local residents/hotel occupants.
    Cancellation of the current show.
    Courtesy cars for all those who have lost their cars.

    Just heard on the news that there were dogs in cars parked on the top level, I wonder if there were more inside that died in the flames.

    There are eye witness reports and photos from the start of the fire pinpointing it to a range rover and I had heard that may have been LPG based but older RR’s are not exactly strangers to fires even without LPG.

    chakaping
    Free Member

    Blimey.

    Car dealers in the North West most be looking forward to a good start to the year.

    slackalice
    Free Member

    And suddenly, with the thought that there might have been dogs in some of the cars, I feel sick.

    Cars and buildings can be replaced, even if it does cause a certain amount of relatively short term inconvenience. The lives of innocent pets/members of a family… 😥

    BigJohn
    Full Member

    Another opportunity for a minute’s silence before the next game at Anfield?

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    Presumably the insurer of the car that caught fire initially coughs up for the lot?

    The first car only caused the damage to a handful of cars near it. Its not that car’s owners fault that those cars then went on to set fire to the ones next to them and so on. 🙂

    I think the general rule where theres multiple loss like this – such as is the in case with multi-car pileups on the motorway- is all the insurers simply agree to cover their own customers losses, rather than pursue other parties. And in the case motorway accidents theres rarely more than a few dozen claimants involved – if insurers don’t want to deal with untangling dozens (I think around 160 vehicles is the largest multi-vehicle incident in the uk) then they definitely don’t want to face being one of 1500 insurers trying to claim against one company or be facing counter claims as all the all the insurers claim against the car to the left of them while being claimed against by the car to the right.

    ninfan
    Free Member

    Just think how many of those cars will have had a top of the range satnav and a boot full of Christmas presents 😉

    dabaldie
    Free Member

    As above, unless negligence is proved the consequential losses from the secondary fires are unrecoverable.
    I had exactly this 2 years ago, my vehicle caught fire due to a building fire adjacent. No negligence could be proved beyond doubt and I lost my excess. Luckily my insurer realised that I was not at fault and honoured my NCB next year. They had a clause that allowed a claim even though my NCB was not protected. Premiums didn’t even go up.

    Rich_s
    Full Member

    A company that will almost certainly be affected by the loss is nfu mutual. Big horse insurer, and carry a lot of land rover type wagons too. Assume that most people there that night are interested in horses, it’s fair to assume a decent proportion will be insured by nfum. But, if (say) they cover 700 cars at an average value of 15k (don’t forget there were horse boxes in there too) that’s only £10.5 Million. About the same as one decent size paralysis or mental impairment claim…

    I made the mistake of reading the local rag comments on it. Some corking comments about “why weren’t there sprinklers?” And “What did the fire brigade actually do!?”

    Slowster is spot on with the ” negligence” thing too. Everyone will carry their own claim on this one I would have thought and there haven’t been many really big losses in the UK for a wee while so I’m sure that the insurers can afford it.

    slowster
    Free Member

    But, if (say) they cover 700 cars at an average value of 15k (don’t forget there were horse boxes in there too) that’s only £10.5 Million. About the same as one decent size paralysis or mental impairment claim…

    … there haven’t been many really big losses in the UK for a wee while so I’m sure that the insurers can afford it.

    Interesting point about the possibility of the NFUM being the insurer of a lot of the vehicles. With regard to the analogy of the total cost being comparable to a single injury compensation claim, I suspect most insurers of the size of the NFUM will have a reinsurance policy which would cover a large proportion of any exceptionally large personal injury claim (like a bookmaker lays off a very large bet: it removes potential volatility from their business by ensuring it is not excessively vulnerable to a single large claim). However, I suspect the NFUM might not have reinsurance cover which would apply to this particular unusual event: an insurer would not anticipate so many of its policyholders’ cars being destroyed in a single fire. If so, the £xM hit will probably put a very large dent in their reserves/assets.

    Rich_s
    Full Member

    £5m limit on PI claims for the reinsurance to kick in iirc. Might be higher now. They do have experience of aggregation losses – apparently the Gloucestershire rugby club M5 crash involved something like 17 nfum insured vehicles against a total of 34 ish. Actuaries do plan for this stuff.
    They have something like £14b under management, piddly little claim like this is not going to scratch the surface. Whether they have adequate staff and systems to be able to handle everything is another matter.

    footflaps
    Full Member

    Just think how many of those cars will have had a top of the range satnav and a boot full of Christmas presents

    Car insurance stopped covering those things years ago after the 90s when everyone claimed for a £2k snap-on toolkit in the boot etc.

    slowster
    Free Member

    They have something like £14b under management, piddly little claim like this is not going to scratch the surface.

    The ‘£14Bn under management’ is, I presume, not the NFUM’s, but rather the value of the investments and funds which they manage for their policyholders, i.e. pension funds, with profits life insurance policies etc. A £10M claim would not put the NFUM out of business, but if it is not significantly reduced by reinsurance, it will hurt, and if their reserves are not large enough, they might have to put up prices next year a bit more than planned.

    They do have experience of aggregation losses… Actuaries do plan for this stuff.

    All insurers have experience of aggregation losses, and they all get caught out from time to time by events which are unusual or inherently difficult – or even impossible – to predict/anticipate. It’s not really an actuarial function, and indeed an over reliance on statistics and statistical theory/modelling can lead insurers to fail to identify high severity/low probability large loss scenarios, which could have been identified by other methods.

    The NFUM has almost certainly employed some of its people to assess its exposure and risk at the event, and it’s possible that they may have identified the accumulation of vehicle exposure in the car park. However, I am doubtful because a) it is very surprising that a car park fire should engulf the whole car park, b) the NFUM is a relatively small insurer without the in depth skills and experience of assessing and underwriting very large risks, and c) I know the latter because I have personal experience of the NFUM’s ability to assess and manage the risks it underwrote, and it was manifestly obvious they were not very competent when it came to large exposures.

    Rich_s
    Full Member

    c) I know the latter because I have personal experience of the NFUM’s ability to assess and manage the risks it underwrote, and it was manifestly obvious they were not very competent when it came to large exposures.

    Ditto.
    100% agreed.
    I’m not sure how it’ll affect their premium plans for next year as I think they make it up as they go. 😉

    dudeofdoom
    Full Member

    it is very surprising that a car park fire should engulf the whole car park,

    hmm used to be , I reckon there may be a bit of intreast in fire safety in multi storeys now..

    weeksy
    Full Member

    BigJohn – Member
    Another opportunity for a minute’s silence before the next game at Anfield?

    And remarkably idiots like you are allowed to vote.

    You should be ashamed of yourself

    Harry_the_Spider
    Full Member

    Hmmm… I know a bloke currently getting messed about by his insurance company. His car was lost when the workshop it was in caught fire and it looks like the claim for his car will be on his own insurance. He’s gutted (as was the car) as he’s lost a packet on it and has had to stump up for a new motor.

    seadog101
    Full Member

    Aa friend of mine, who has not had a great year (business going under, bereavement, etc) has lost their car to this. Shitty way end the year.

    project
    Free Member

    The chief fire officer of merseyside has said he had difficulty accessing foam to put out the fire,eg limited stock, and video on Sky shows the upper floors brnt though and cars burnt out and suspended on bits of thin steel plate. There was also a good wind blowing last night to fan the flames.

    Be intresting to see if the insurance companies pay out, already Virgin trains have refused travel to a family whos documents are inside the damaged hotel,despite them having proof of purchase.

    maccruiskeen
    Full Member

    I was wondering about the structural integrity of the car park itself, too; heat that intense, with cold water being pumped onto the concrete is going to cause spalling, and likely other structural damage, surely their only option would be to level it and rebuild it? I can’t imagine it would be safe to just repair the damaged surfaces.

    It’ll be fine

    singletrackmind
    Full Member

    I nearly set a multi storey car park on fire once.
    Trying to hot wire my Saab 900 T16s . We filled the cylinders with petrol and hydo locked the engine. We whipped out the plugs , and my mate had the sense to disconnect the feed to the coil. We cranked over the engine to pump out the cylinders,The petrol sprayed out the spark plug holes like a hose pipe. All over the ceiling of the car park, you could visably see a wave of evaporating petrol boiling its way across the ceiling .

    ‘ No one smoke’ was the comment from my mate as we waited for the fireball. Fortuanlty no explosion , but we waited about 15mins for the wind to clear all the fumes and evap off the remaing petrol from the roof to put the car back together and start twisting wires together again.

    That car park also doesn’t full to me , lots of spaces so maybe less than the 1400 estimated

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