What Did Your Property Look Like Before the Storm?
Why pre-loss condition, causation and repairability are three different questions.
After a significant storm, everyone wants to know what was damaged. That question sounds simple until the property being evaluated is ten, fifteen, twenty, or thirty years old.
Buildings age. Roofing materials weather. Coatings deteriorate. Sealants fail. Metal oxidizes. Previous repairs remain visible. Mechanical equipment ages. Exterior finishes fade. Construction moves, expands, contracts, and responds to years of exposure.
Then a storm occurs. Now the condition that existed before the storm and the damage caused by the storm have to be separated. That distinction has always mattered in property insurance claims, but it is becoming increasingly important in Texas claim disputes involving preexisting conditions, wear and tear, and what lawyers refer to as concurrent causation.
There is another issue that should not get lost in that discussion:
What caused the damage and what is required to repair the damage are not necessarily the same question.
Start With Pre-Loss Documentation
Property insurance is not intended to convert an aging building into a new one simply because a storm occurred.
If a roof contained ordinary wear before the loss, that condition does not suddenly become storm damage. The same applies to deterioration, deferred maintenance, previous damage, installation deficiencies, and other conditions that existed before the event.
But the reverse is equally important. The existence of an older condition does not establish that everything observed after a storm was already there. That is where pre loss documentation can become extremely valuable.
Recent photographs of roofs, exterior elevations, ceilings, interior finishes, mechanical areas, windows, doors, outbuildings, and other significant components can establish a point in time.
They can help answer a very important question:
What changed?
When Covered and Uncovered Causes Enter the Same Conversation
Texas courts have dealt for decades with claims involving more than one potential cause of damage. The legal issues can become complicated quickly. Under what is commonly called the concurrent causation doctrine, disputes may arise when covered and excluded causes are alleged to have combined to produce a loss and the amount attributable to each cause becomes an issue.
The law in this area is not as simple as saying that the presence of wear and tear automatically defeats a storm claim.
In Overstreet v. Allstate, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit confronted a hail claim in which the insurance company attributed much of the roof condition to wear, tear, and earlier storms. The court explained that Texas cases had sent mixed signals about when concurrent causation applies and what a policyholder must prove when it does. The Fifth Circuit ultimately certified questions to the Texas Supreme Court seeking clarification. The case settled before those questions were answered.
For a property owner, the important lesson is not the legal terminology.
It is the importance of evidence. The better the evidence showing the property's condition before and after a particular event, the easier it becomes to have a meaningful discussion about what actually changed.
Causation Is Only One Question
Suppose a roofing system already has ordinary age and weathering when a hailstorm occurs. An investigation identifies physical damage caused by the storm.
The first question is:
What did the storm damage?
But the investigation should not necessarily end there.
The next question is:
Can the covered damage actually be repaired?
Those questions are related, but they are not interchangeable.
A roof, exterior wall, metal panel system, membrane, flashing assembly, or other building component does not exist as a collection of independent pieces. Construction materials are installed as systems. Repairing one component may require disturbing another. Materials may have to be lifted, separated, detached, manipulated, fastened, sealed, cut, removed, or integrated with surrounding construction before a proper repair can be completed.
That reality can make the necessary scope of repair larger than the precise area that sustained the initial physical damage.
An Old Roof Can Still Be an Unrepairable Roof
This distinction is particularly important when age and repairability intersect.
Preexisting wear may be relevant when determining whether a particular condition was caused by the storm. That same preexisting condition can also affect whether covered storm damage can physically be repaired. Those are not the same question.
If a covered loss damages part of a roofing system and the damaged material cannot reasonably be repaired without damaging adjoining material, the analysis should not stop with counting the components that sustained the initial storm damage.
The question becomes what is reasonably necessary to accomplish the repair.
The Texas Supreme Court recognized this distinction in State Farm Lloyds v. Johnson, a hail case involving a dispute over whether only a portion of a roof required repair or whether the roof needed replacement. The Court recognized that repairing one part of a roof can sometimes require replacing substantially more and treated the extent of repair or replacement as part of determining the amount of loss.
That principle reaches beyond asphalt shingles.
Metal roofing panels may run continuously from eave to ridge. Flashings can be integrated behind siding or other finishes. Membrane roofing repairs may require access beyond the visibly damaged area. Tile can require manipulation of surrounding pieces. Exterior cladding may have to be detached to reach weather barriers or flashing. Mechanical equipment may have to be disconnected or moved to access damaged roofing beneath it.
Construction determines what the repair actually requires.
Direct Damage and Necessary Repair Scope
This is where claim discussions can become unnecessarily narrow. Identifying the components that sustained direct physical damage is important. Counting damaged components does not necessarily establish the complete scope of repair.
If ten roof components sustained covered physical damage, the question is not merely what ten replacement components cost. The question is what operations are necessary to remove the damaged materials, install the replacements, integrate them into the existing construction, and leave the building with a completed repair.
Sometimes that can be accomplished locally, sometimes it cannot. The answer should come from the actual construction, not from an assumption made before repairability has been evaluated.
Document More Than Damage
This is why property documentation should not begin after the loss. Take photographs while the property is in its ordinary condition.
For commercial and multifamily properties, maintain inspection reports, roof maintenance records, invoices, repair records, photographs, renovation documents, and information about major building systems.
If work is performed, document what was done.
If a roof is inspected and found serviceable, keep the report.
If a previous leak is repaired, preserve the invoice and photographs.
If a section of siding or roofing is replaced, document the location.
Those records may someday help distinguish an old condition from a new one.
They may also help demonstrate something equally important:
The property was functioning before the event.
Three Questions, Not One
When a property with some age suffers a covered loss, three separate questions may eventually need answers:
What condition existed before the loss?
What physical damage did the covered event cause?
What work is reasonably necessary to repair that damage?
Treating those as one question can produce the wrong conclusion. Pre loss documentation helps establish the first. A thorough investigation helps answer the second. Construction knowledge is often necessary to answer the third.
That is why understanding a property before the storm can matter just as much as documenting it afterward.
Sources and Further Reading
Texas Supreme Court, State Farm Lloyds v. Johnson, 290 S.W.3d 886 (Tex. 2009).
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, Overstreet v. Allstate Vehicle & Property Insurance Co., 34 F.4th 496 (5th Cir. 2022).
Important Note
Insurance coverage depends on the individual policy and facts of the loss. This article is educational and is not intended as legal advice.
Chaos is Temporary. Control is Pivotal.
Pivotal Public Adjusters LLC
Texas Public Adjuster License No. 3264340
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