Advice please. Insurance claim rejected

[JohannaMaria]

Dear Forum members

Any advise would be very welcome please

Back in September we had an terrifying 'incident' when the bow thruster jammed full on as we turned to port below Bray in strong current on the Thames.

In due course, the insurance company decided to send an assessor to inspect the damage to the bow thruster (which burnt out, having run for almost 10 minutes) and electrical cables (which melted all along the length of our 20 metre barge) In total more than £5000 will be needed to make all the repairs.

It transpired that the wiring was faulty (the positive cable was connected to the wrong terminal on the battery isolating switch - this was not picked up by the surveyor in Holland or the UK boat safety examiner!) and intially the insurance company rejected the claim completely. After 'discussions' the insurance company appear to accept that there was a latent defect which we could not have know about in the boat. A latent defect is covered under the terms of the policy but the insurers continue to deny our claim on the basis that although all the AC and DC cables melted (and filled the whole boat with smoke at the time) the damage was not caused by an insured peril, namely fire....

Our local fire brigade have commented that fire can take many forms, including electrical flash, chemical burning and smouldering but cannot offer any advice that would support the claim.

If anyone else has had to fight something like this and won we would be grateful for any advice on how to proceed.

Many, many thanks for any thoughts
H and B on Johanna Maria

 

[Chris_d]

Try posting this on the Mobochat forum, there are some very clever legal types on there that might be able to help. Be prepared to take bit of flake over the use of bowthrusters though /forums/images/graemlins/smile.gif

 

[JohannaMaria]

Thank you for the suggestion. Don't know the forum. Please could you post a link or the web address?
RE bow thrusters, the use of, yes understood but with 45 tonnes on the move sometimes a bit of help up front is a GOOD thing ....especially around other people's pride and joy! /forums/images/graemlins/laugh.gif

 

[Chris_d]

Mobochat is on this site here .

I'm surprised this sort of thing doesn't happen more often as you see a lot of peeps steering their boats with bow thrusters, most of them are only rated for very light use for just the occasional nudge away from a lock wall etc...
However in your case with 45tonnes to push around they are very useful, if correctly rated for the job. Have you tried tracing back to the original installer as clearly they have done a defective job, if there is no circuit breaker or way of isolating the supply it was an accident waiting to happen.

 

[JohannaMaria]

Hi again and thanks for the link. All we know about the original installation was that it was circa 1996 - that's 2 owners back so not much joy there

 

[golden14]

Alas having studied for my sins electrical engineering, an electrical fire breaks out at the weakest point in the system, say for example you have a 1920's house and most of it has been rewired but not all, and then you plug in a 5kw fire upstairs you could then find the wiring downstairs overloads and catches fire. Hence sadly you my not have a claim against the installer. You need to establish the exact cause of the overload, think of this - 6inch water pipe installed correctly, mating to 3 inch water pipe, 2 into 1 won't go but each may have been correctly installed. Hope this helps in some kind of way but you need to establish the root cause first, if not you could find yourself accusing the wrong person and then being on the end of a slander/liable law suit.