Our Beautiful House in the Bay of Islands was destroyed on the night of 9 September ’11.
Be WARNED, if your house burns down it is only the start of your problems, your insurance company may take months to accept your claim leaving you HOMELESS, they may even do absolutely nothing or decline your claim and leave you the option of suing them to make them honour their contract!
Looks like a bomb site!
The fire started around midnight and grew, according to neighbors at an incredible rate.
The Fire Brigade arrived quickly but couldn’t control it due to the lack of water mainly.
The DAMAGE
We loved our fabulous house, it was our pride and joy as you can see in the photographs in our report about the loss we have suffered.
Everything was destroyed, all our stunning possessions, furniture, photographs that mean so much, every little thing that makes your home, home!
Two cars were in the garage, my beautiful Mercedes and our daughters pretty little MX5, both burnt out, hardly recognisable.
Compare the photograph above to the image below, only the one balcony remains, the one on the far right of the image, the room behind it was totally blitzed as was the whole interior of the house.
My office, behind the second balcony from the right, survived best internally but nothing can be salvaged!
The STORY
We had a break-in! About 10 days before the fire we returned home from walking the dogs to find the front door open, we drove around the house and saw the back door had been smashed but nobody appeared to be around. We entered, expecting the worst and found the house was untouched, a few doors were open but nothing had apparently been taken! It was scary, we called the Police, a very helpful Policewoman arrived, we were in shock and she looked around, spoke to us for about an hour and finally left. She recommended fitting a loud burglar alarm, I ordered one a few days later. It was strange, the house felt odd, noises in the night, banging and lights on in the barn began to cause us distress. My wife and daughter would not stay in the house alone as they had done before, as each night passed we became sure that someone was moving about outside, lights came on in the barn, sometimes on in the mornings, things, tools, tables and chairs, were being moved around in the garden. It wasn’t serious enough to call the Police again but we got very uneasy.
I suggested going away for a few days, Ellie wanted to move to Waikato Uni, Alex lived in Hamilton so we decided a break away from the noises that we considered to be just our imagination would help us all! The cats went to the cattery and the dogs came with us as we set off in the early morning, unwittingly into the chaos in Auckland due to the opening of the RWC. We finally arrived, had a curry and went to bed, a quiet sleep!
The phone rang at 9am, the Police reported the house had been seriously damaged by fire and could we come back asap! At the suggestion of the Motel receptionist we dumped some stuff at the motel to save time repacking the car and headed for home in a blur!
It was awful, the house looked like a cruise missile had hit it, there was just destruction, utter destruction. I wandered around the site with the Police and Fire officers pointing out what was where and identifying burnt out remains but we were all in utter shock, the reality didn’t hit us for many hours! They couldn’t suggest what had caused the fire, they had spent all day searching the ashes and had found the smallest items but nothing that could have caused it. We spent the night at a neighbors house.
I called STATE Insurance in the morning, they were very helpful saying they would arrange temporary accommodation later in the day. AMI promised a quick payout for the cars, they just needed a Police report. We went back to the house, it was deserted, not a crime scene, nobody was there. We had to try to calm the horses down, they had been running around the paddocks during the fire, escaped and been caught but were naturally very disturbed. As we left some Fire brigade officials arrived to check the site was safe and then STATE Insurance rang us. We would have to find our own accommodation, at our expense since the fire was suspicious, they wouldn’t pay anything until they accepted the claim!
We were stunned yet again, we had just the clothes we had taken away for the weekend, little cash and nowhere to live! We had done nothing to cause the fire, intentionally or accidentally yet we we being made to feel like it was all our fault!
The Loss Adjuster appointed by STATE insurance arrived the next day, he too was horrified by the extent of the damage and the scale of the house, it was obviously going to be a massive claim. He told us that STATE insurance would appoint an investigator to discover the cause of the fire before they would accept the claim.
We found a furnished house for rent in Paihia and later that day the NIGHTMARE really began!
Maurie Fletcher, the Investigator appointed by STATE Insurance arrived!
Over 6 months later, we have had no decision from STATE Insurance, we are living in a rented house well away from Kerikeri. We have little money, no income since our businesses where ll in the house, no clothes and winter is setting in! STATE Insurance, have refused to pay us one cent, they just point at the investigator saying they are waiting for his report, we currently have to depend totally on the cash we get from Sickness Benefit, we have done nothing wrong at all!
Before you pay your Insurance Premium remember that you also need to put away several thousand dollars into a reserve account to live on if you have to claim for a total loss of your property!
State Insurance may take months to investigate your claim, first they will try to determine the source of the fire and blame it on you!
If they cannot do that then State Insurance will try to show you lied to them when you took out the policy and then, if they cannot find a reason not to pay you based on errors in the application they will go on, seemingly endlessly investigating your past looking for a detail, maybe a very minor detail, 30 years ago that they will claim you didn’t declare to them!
This reason for not accepting the claim, State Insurance hope will stand up to scrutiny in the Courts so they will not pay your claim!
It is a great system that the insurance companies do not want the public to know about!
You therefore should also put the cash to pay for the Court case to get State Insurance to pay into that fund! The reserve fund is getting a bit big now, worse you also need to pay for lots of medical insurance, the stress caused by the investigation, sudden homelessness and the sheer futility of the whole thing is enough to destroy the health of anybody yet alone deal with the stress caused by the loss itself!
The cost of the investigation into our claim must be huge, specialists flying to Northland from Wellington, hiring cars, staying in hotels for night after night, visit after visit! The investigator spending weeks chasing around and around endlessly asking totally irrelevant questions! They use Private investigators and Private Fire Assessors so that they can claim that they are INDEPENDENT firms, State Insurance happily blame the Independent investigators for the delay that they claim is out of their control! These Independent Investigators seemingly work exclusively for the Insurance industry, they are in no way INDEPENDENT!
We don’t know what caused the fire, we know we have lost everything and we didn’t cause it in any way!
What are we meant to do?
Maybe nothing would help if STATE INSURANCE has adopted the DELAY, DENY, DEFEND policy to avoid making payouts on valid claims, this is common in the USA – see the details here!