Oilpressure

One of the few advantages of the IndyCar offseason, for me anyway, is that I have the freedom to go off-topic on this site from time to time. Sometimes it might be my annual rant about buzz-words and catch-phrases that annoy me, although I didn’t do one of those this past offseason. Other times, it might be describing a visit to an overly trendy restaurant that Susan and I were coerced into going to.

Sometimes, my non-racing topics take on a more serious tone – such as when Susan was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July of 2020, or when my mother suddenly passed away less than three weeks later.

Today, I will take the opportunity to veer away from discussing IndyCar, to discuss something not near as serious as those two examples; but it is more important (to us anyway) than the rant I posted last January on the local barbeque hotspot that would only appeal to millennials.

Back in early August, Nashville went through about a ten-day stretch of very heavy rainfall. It affected the race weekend for the Music City Grand Prix and flash-flood warnings were common. On the evening of Wednesday August 9, it was raining particularly hard – all day and night.

Our house was built in 1978. We have an added-on room that goes straight off of our den and empties out onto a covered patio. The room covers what was once the original patio. As best we can tell, the room was added in the mid-80s. We call this room “the sun porch”. There are windows that open across all three sides, that are also screened. When we moved in, our intent was to have a nice place to have coffee on a chilly fall Saturday morning. Instead it turned into an unsightly junk room, when I cleared out my storage space five or six years ago.

The Achilles heel of this room is that it has a flat roof, which always have a bad outcome. Coupled with that was the fact that there was only one support beam underneath. When that was combined with the deluge of rain we had in early August, something had to give – it was the lone support beam.

When I awoke the morning of Thursday August 10, I was greeted by the following sight. The support beam had snapped (you can see the marks where it once was), and the ceiling was sagging. Surprisingly, there was no water damage or even a bit of leakage. Not one drop got through. It was still raining slightly and was dark, but I got out on a ladder and threw a pool cover pump to pump the water off.

By the time the sun came up, it had stopped raining and the pump was still pumping. It pumps around 300 gallons per hour and it pumped about an hour and a half; meaning it pumped about 450 gallons off of the roof. A gallon of water weighs a little more than eight pounds, so essentially I pumped over 3500 pounds (almost two tons) off of that roof – probably preventing a massive collapse, which turned out to be a mistake on my part.

We filed a claim that morning with Nationwide, our carrier since we bought the house. We also bundled all of our cars with them and have never filed a claim until now. I fielded three routine calls from Nationwide during the day, and everything seemed fine. We were scheduled to leave the next morning for Indianapolis to attend the Gallagher Grand Prix. They could not get anyone out until the next week, so we went ahead with our weekend plans, instructing Susan’s son to turn the pump on if it rained.

It was when we got back from Indianapolis that things started sounding fishy. They finally got an adjuster out to look at it on Friday Aug 17 – eight days after it happened. Then things went silent. I called the adjuster, the local claims specialist, kept checking our claim on the website, as well as anyone in the home office I could get to. Either no one claimed to know anything or no one would call me back.

After more than five weeks of trying to track people down and getting evasive answers, the claims specialist called this past Friday Sep 15, to inform us that Nationwide would not be paying a dime toward fixing our roof. Our claim had been sent to a team of lawyers in their Legal Department to scour through our policy, until they found themselves a loophole. When they found it, we were denied.

Had it collapsed completely, they would have covered it – which made me want to go out and knock the whole thing down. I now wish I had not bothered to pump all of that water off. I should have just let it fall in.

To add further insult, he said that the sagging roof would have been covered had it been caused by the weight of snow or ice. But our policy did not cover water weight. When I reminded him that snow and ice were both water, he was not amused.

Had they denied us the week it happened, we could have at least moved on to Plan B and gotten it repaired. It could have been fixed by now. Instead, here we are forty days later and not a thing has been done. We avoid the room and keep the door shut to keep the dogs out, because it is now a safety hazard. I feel like any jarring of the walls could make the whole thing come crashing down. I finally have someone coming out Tuesday to take a look at it and give us an estimate. My guess is between $5-10K. That’s a drop in the bucket to Nationwide, but it puts a massive dent into our bank account.

When we went to Indianapolis that weekend it happened, I was not worried about it at all. We had peace of mind, knowing that our homeowner’s insurance with a well-known company was going to take care of us – and we had an enjoyable weekend. Five weeks later, we found out that Nationwide will use their battery of attorneys to wiggle out of paying any claim they can – no matter how small.

I told the claims specialist (who was very nice and friendly, by the way) that we would be canceling our policy next week, as soon as we could find other coverage. We’ve been paying money each month for years, for that peace of mind for whenever that day might come. When it finally came, Nationwide turned their back on us, and hid behind attorneys and loopholes when we needed them. I told him I was not going to give them another dime of my money. He confided that he didn’t blame me.

Nationwide is definitely NOT on your side!

Thanks for reading my rant, if you made it this far. I will return on Wednesday with more IndyCar-related content. In the meantime, if you are ever shopping around for a new insurance carrier, avoid Nationwide at all cost. You’re welcome!

George Phillips

This entry was posted on September 18, 2023 at 4:02 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.