View this article online: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2008/08/06/92538.htm
XL Insurance, XL Capital Ltd’s global insurance operation, has announced the availability of a specialized environmental insurance program that addresses pollution liability and clean-up expenses for US warehouses, storage and distribution facilities.
The policies, underwritten by Greenwich Insurance Company and Indian Harbor Insurance Company, “provides coverage for remediation expense, bodily injury and property damage, and legal defense for pollution conditions resulting at or from the insured warehouse or distribution center,” said the announcement. Both companies are member insurers of the XL Capital Group.
Rich Corbett, head of XL Insurance’s Global Environmental Insurance unit, explained: “While environmental incidents tend to be low frequency events for businesses, when they do occur they can be high cost events that can severely impact a company’s profitability. Tasked with storing products that can often pose pollution risks, operators of warehouses and distribution centers often pay close attention to the proper storage and handling of possibly harmful materials to prevent such incidents.”
He added that, “as a result of what they have witnessed or read in news reports, warehouse operators have a growing concern about the potential pollution conditions that could stem from products stored at their facilities if they suffer a catastrophic event such as fire, flood or windstorm.”
XL noted that some common environmental risks faced by warehouses and distribution centers include:
— Spills or leaks during the loading or unloading of materials from trucks and railcars
— Contamination as a result of a fire at the facility
— Waste from on-site vehicle or forklift maintenance and storage
— Gradual leaks from material containers stored at the facility
“This is particularly worthwhile coverage for facilities when they realize the limited environmental insurance coverage that their general liability (GL) insurance offers, Corbett concluded. “Most GL policies offer very limited or no environmental insurance coverage at all as a result of policies’ absolute pollution exclusion.”
Source: XL Insurance – www.xlinsurance.com or www.xlcapital.com