One of the upsides of apartment living is that you aren’t responsible for many of the maintenance issues that come with homeownership. One of the downsides is that y
ou can’t always just do whatever you want with your apartment. Another upside is that you have the potential of a built-in community with neighbors in the building. The downside to that is you don’t always get to pick who your neighbors are and what they might do.
Take this story, shared by ABC News on X. A woman simply wanted to get some exercise in her apartment. Rather than getting an exercise bike, weight set, or doing virtual tai chi, she wanted to learn pole dancing. She got a pole, s
et it up in her apartment, and gave it a try. The pole wasn’t installed properly. It shifted and hit the sprinkler. You don’t have to watch the video to know what happened next.
This brings us to the wonderful world of habitational properties, insurance, where the checks are coming from, and who is getting them. Let’s track what is likely to happen next. The water came into her apartment, damaging her property and parts of the building. Considering that a standard f
ire sprinkler head can release between 13 and 26 gallons of water per minute, if it takes 10 minutes for someone to turn the water off, that means over 200 gallons of water could be released and it’s going somewhere.
Watch More Image Part 2 >>>
The water will work through the floors and walls into adjacent apartments, the hallway, and the apartments below this unit. All of those units could experience damage to the units and the personal property in them. Everyone t
hat has property damage is going to be looking at someone else to repair or replace their property. They will trace the source of the water back to a slightly damaged sprinkler head, and whether people call their renters’ insurer or an attorney, in the end, there are two likely subjects for lawsuits for those damages: the renter and the landlord.
While you can’t plan for everything that a renter might do (did anyone really have pole-dancing sprinkler breakage on their bingo card?), you can prepare for the eventuality that someone might do something and get themselves and the landlord sued.
Make sure the property owner is properly covered.
In this case, we have a renter who is likely responsible for the damage to the building. We say likely because there’s still the possibility that we might have a products liability claim here, but that’s beyond the scope of this article. Even
with a responsible party, that doesn’t mean all claims have a responsible party. That simply means the first layer of protection for the building owner is a solid commercial property policy.
Without diving into policy minutia, that means the property needs as many covered causes of loss as possible. In this case, we would be hoping that any water exclusions wouldn’t include accidental discharge from a sprinkler system, but there are endorsements that exclude sprinkler leakage. We wouldn’t want to find anything related to that after the sprinkler was damaged from being hit by the dance pole.