Insurance Law

Kodrin Katrina case: Fifth Circuit vacates punitive damage award against State Farm, upholds verdict of wind damage

By David Rossmiller

Kodrin v. State Farm is one of the Katrina cases, which I wrote about previously here and here.  It was different from many Katrina cases in that, at least as far as what was presented to the jury, there was nothing to sort out about wind vs. water and what damage had been caused by each.  So this is not one of the cases where anti-concurrent cause language became an issue -- although as I repeatedly talk about, under the facts of Katrina damage, anti-concurrent cause language should never have been an issue, because the facts of Katrina damage do not support analysis of the damage as caused by concurrent causes. 

I never get tired of saying this: I will be saying it in my speeches at the PLRB conference in Seattle later this month, and I probably will still be saying it when I am a little old man sitting in a rocker in front of the TV complaining about how the neighbor kids are so loud I can't hear my programs and by the way, why doesn't the milk wagon come anymore? No set of facts I have looked at -- and I have looked at a lot of them -- shows that any Katrina damage was caused by anything other than single forces working independently.  A lot of you may have heard this before, so you can skip the rant and jump down to a further discussion of Kodrin, but I think it bears repeating because this point is so easily lost in time.  Homeowners policies insure against damage to property, property has various elements.  Unless multiple concurrent forces cause the same damage to the same element of property, that is, unless they worked together to cause that result and unless it would not have occurred except for the combination, concurrent causes were not at work.

Kodrin is the ultimate in single causation questions: that's all the jury heard, a dichotomy between the Kodrins' claim that wind alone destroyed their house, and State Farm's claim that flood alone destroyed their house.  This may sound like a strange set-up to you, until you look at the facts of the case: the whole neighborhood was hit by Katrina flooding, which washed the rest of the houses off their foundations and kind of pooled them in one location.  These homes, although severely damaged, were not utterly torn down and demolished.  The Kodrins' home, among all of them, was the only one obliterated. 

This led them to,  as the Fifth Circuit put it in their opinion from a few days ago, "speculate" that a tornado destroyed the house.  Their claim was belied by their acceptance of the policy limits of their flood insurance.  I don't say this to be a smart alec, but rather because I wonder about this flood payment in Kodrin and a number of other instances: did they give the flood money back or did they keep it? I ask this because the choice before the jury was all wind or all flood, and the jury found all wind. So what happened to the federal flood money?   

The jury, as the first link above shows, felt the Kodrins had been treated unfairly and awarded them the maximum amount under the policy plus punitive damages under Louisiana law.   I'm not sure if I'm adding it up correctly, but it looks like the punitive damages were about $135,000, plus about another $140,000 in statutory attorney fees and costs, not a huge amount in the scheme of things, but the precedent was important to State Farm, I imagine. 

The challenge to the verdict on the damage itself, as opposed to the punitive damage portion, was a steep climb uphill -- you have to show that the jury instructions were wrong and prejudicial, and stuff of that ilk.  Most of the time such challenges don't succeed, and this one was no different.  Even though it wasn't necessary for the court to parse out causes -- because whether you believed it was wind or water that caused the damage, it was presented to the jury as an instance of single force causation -- I was pleased to see the Fifth Circuit panel recognized that merely because flood destroys a house does not mean that covered wind damage didn't previously occur.  This is the example they used, in footnote 15 on page 7:

It is important to distinguish between this dispute over which force totally destroyed a home and cases in which the parties disagree as to the causes of various damaged elements of a home. Distinct elements of damage would have to be considered separately. Flood damaged carpets, for example, would not bar recovery for a wind-damaged roof.

Now, this gives me some hope that this panel gets it when it comes to an understanding of the proper analysis to differentiate between single and multiple force damage: first determine what the loss is.  The example used, flooded carpets and wind-damaged roof, was a fairly common scenario in Katrina damage, but it really doesn't present any analytical problems, only problems of proof.  The real test of understanding is the realization that the carpet itself, or the roof itself, could be damaged by two single forces that caused separate damage, one covered and one uncovered, and that this does not make them concurrent forces. 

A house is not a unitary phenomenon of property, it has constituent elements that themselves are property.  Constituent elements such as carpet, likewise, are not monolithic, but have various degrees of worth as property -- merely because wind tears some pages out of a book does not make the book worthless, although its value might be lessened considerably.  There is still some value there when the book is destroyed by flood -- the two forces worked separately to cause separate damage, and the damage from the first force still occurred and caused damage even though the second force would have taken all the value of the book away.  The key is would have: in the hypothetical I pose, that is not actually what happened, and so would have doesn't matter.  However, as I said, it wasn't necessary for the Fifth Circuit to consider that issue this time, and so they didn't, and this is just as well, because explanations from the Fifth Circuit of Katrina causation analysis usually haven't been that great.

Although the court left standing the jury verdict on property damage, it vacated the award of punitive damages.  The court said, in light of the evidence, there could be an honest dispute about what caused the damage to the Kodrin home.  Again here, I don't know what happened with the flood payment, whether that was returned or not, or the precise circumstances under which it was applied for, paid and accepted, but the very fact of a flood payment creates an idea in my mind that there could be an honest belief that flood caused the damage. 

Here's what  the court said about bad faith, when it exists and when it doesn't: 

State Farm declared that it determined flooding was the more likely cause of the damage to the home because (1) the Kodrins' neighborhood was inundated when a levee was overtopped during Hurricane Katrina, (2) the Kodrins' home was just one house away from that levee, and (3) many other houses in the area were lifted off their foundations and destroyed by the floodwaters. The Kodrins themselves acknowledged that their claimed wind damage to their home was unusual in their neighborhood, advancing that a tornado must have caused the damage as their speculation why their home was the only one in the area destroyed by wind, not flooding. On these facts, we perceive no probative evidence that State Farm acted in bad faith. State Farm's refusal to pay was with reason, even if the jury ultimately rejected that reason. The Kodrins have failed to prove otherwise; they essentially ask this court to find bad faith any time an insurer denies coverage and a jury disagrees. This would unduly pressure insurers to pay out claims that they have reason to believe lie outside the scope of coverage, solely to avoid penalties later. Such a rule would pervert the presumption that insurers act in good faith unless the insured proves bad faith, and this is foreclosed by Louisiana law.

Full post as published by Insurance Coverage Law Blog on March 13, 2009 (boomark / email).