Contract Works Insurance - Who said Insurance was boring
Believe it or not insurance can sometimes be very exciting......
Recently we placed some insurance for a major client of ours involved in a large refit of a a building in Wellington. Part of the brief for our client was to install $1,000,000 worth of new airconditiong into an existing building. The total cost of the contract was $10,000,000 which our client was a sub contractor. The main contractor had arranged contract works insurance however when we were advising our client it became apparent that there was some major gaps in this arrangement.
It turns out that the air conditioning units were being delivered by truck curbside and then they were to be lifted off the deck of the truck onto the top of the building by Crane. The crane hire company did not insure the air conditioning units whilst being lifted (unless they were negligent) the main contractor through NZS3910 made our client responsible for units but our client did not own the air conditioning units as they were owned by the principal (building owner). This made it difficult to establish who was responsible for insurance and they were being lifted the very next day. Failure to get the insurance in place could have delayed the whole job.
This made things pretty exciting as we only had half a day before the lift was due to take place. We got the client to email a copy of the contract and insurance conditions in NZS3910 through to us. We then were able to liase with the main contractor, building owner and our client to negogiate who would be responsible in the event of a loss and then arranged the appropriate insurance cover, confirmed cover and provided the appropriate insurance certificates to the satisfaction of all parties so the lift could take place.
So whilst insurance isn't that exciting sometimes here in the office things can get a little bit heated..... Well to us anyway we love this sort of stuff as it really shows off what we can do with the hard to place risks and things that are unusual.
