What Is It Like Working With Insurance For a Large Structure Fire?

As many of you have seen on my social media, we suffered a large structure fire in our 3 story condo at Attitash Mountain Village across from Attitash Mountain Ski Resort. The 3-alarm fire broke out on December 20th, 2023 right before the holidays. The fire engulfed a lot of the building including all of our 3rd floor and caused massive water and smoke damage to our other 2 stories. (All of which were newly renovated after purchasing in April earlier this past year.)

Since the news broke out, we’ve been escorted in to see the damage and have spoken to multiple insurance adjusters about the process. Because it’s a condo, it’s a lot more complex than a single-family home would be. We have to rely on the master insurance from the condo association for a majority of the rehab before our personal insurance will take over for upgrades and contents.

We were on our first annual Christmas cruise on day 2 when we started getting messages of this happening at our condo. We felt extremely helpless being so far away and to say it put a damper on the trip would be an understatement. We tried to make the best of our vacation, but this dark cloud was looming over us with what we would have to deal with when we got back. That was even before we realized the HUGE financial hardship this would cause our family. You see, it costs $3000 per month to keep that place sitting empty, unusable, and unrentable. Mortgage payments and condo fees do not stop just because your property burns down. Usage and vacation rentals do stop, however… Never in a million years did we think something like this would happen to us.

We contacted our insurance company, Safeco with Liberty Mutual, as soon as we found out and started the claims process which has been a complete disaster so far. An investigator contacted us to discuss what happened and to provide info on his ongoing investigation. Right now, they are speculating an electrical fire broke out in another unit a few doors down from ours, but they are waiting for some lab results to come back before ruling in that direction. Liberty Mutual assigned us a desk adjuster and a field adjuster who contacted us to go out. Since the condo is flagged off because it’s an investigation site and dangerous, you must get an escort from management at Attitash to enter. We shared this with our field adjuster who was going to go visit it while we were still away and also let him know there wasn’t any power to the building so he should go in the daylight.

Fast forward to the day the field adjuster was supposed to go out, he showed up just before dark and didn’t contact the manager for the escort that we shared with him from Attitash so he needed to reschedule. It was OK with us because that meant we could make a trip up there to meet him as we’d be back from our cruise. We were back one day from our family vacation and then we quickly made arrangements for our kids and dog so we could take the trip up to New Hampshire the next day. We had a window to meet between 12-2 on New Year’s Day to meet the adjuster at the condo, but we also had to drive the almost 4 hours back home to get our kids for school the next day. When we checked in to make sure we would still be within that window, he tried to push us to the end of the day which would again, be in the dark, and past the time we really needed to be heading back home. Once pushed, he rearranged his schedule to make our originally planned window work.

At the meeting, our adjuster let us know there wasn’t much he could do until the investigation was done and the demo took place. We didn’t know this since no one up until this point had relayed any info about the process to us. It was nice to put a face to the name, but other than that, it didn’t feel like anything was accomplished during this meeting. Sadly, we drove back home to carry on with day-to-day life while waiting for some news from Liberty Mutual. We sent countless emails to our desk adjuster asking for a call to please go over the process. Finally, someone escalated our emails and we were put in touch with someone who was not our original desk adjuster to call and discuss the process. She asked me to send in our rental history, photos, and spreadsheet I had with all contents listed out by floor. We had that over to her within a matter of a few days. Then NOTHING. CRICKETS. We asked multiple times if she received it, no response…Again, we started emailing everyone we had a contact for and again we were switched to a new point of contact and told we had a new desk adjuster. Oh, and I forgot to mention, in the very beginning before coming home, they already switched people on us because of the “complexity” of the claim so we were on to our 4th point of contact with no resolutions in sight. I cannot even begin to tell you how frustrating this is!!

January 12th, 2024 was another day the investigator was going out to do some investigating on the fire. We let our field adjuster know in case he wanted to be there. He originally told us he would be, then told us later he didn’t need to be and most likely wouldn’t be there, but the day before, he called asking for the contact person in management to go back in on that very same date. At this point, we had TEXT him that contact person at least 4 times and it was literally his last text from us in a very small thread so he could have easily referenced it. This is all making me lose my confidence in Liberty Mutual’s abilities. Is anyone doing their job and trying to help us?! What are we even paying for all of these years with insurance companies reacting like this to something completely devastating to our family?!

Last Thursday, the company the hired field adjuster works for reached out to let us know they had already submitted our report earlier in the week and it would have final review and approval by the next day. Monday, no report was available to Liberty Mutual until late in the day. Both sides kept pointing the finger at the other, but who can we trust here? We are on day 33 of this never-ending nightmare.

As of January 24th, we are still getting nowhere from our point of view. The communication has been terrible. I would never be able to stay in business handling clients this way. We are still waiting for some confirmation from Liberty Mutual that they are going to approve something for us soon. Meanwhile, our neighbors have USAA insurance and have already received a loss of rent check as well as a maxed-out personal contents check from their policy agreement. If you are eligible for USAA, I sincerely hope you check them out. It seems they react faster in a time of need…

Our Story Will Continue……………….