Karas v. Liberty Ins. Corp.

Citations

• 335 Conn. 62

Syllabus

The plaintiffs, whose home was insured by the defendant insurance com- pany, sought to recover damages from the defendant in an action brought in the United District Court for the District of Connecticut. The plaintiffs alleged, inter alia, that the defendant had breached certain provisions of the applicable homeowners insurance policy by declining coverage for the purported collapse of their concrete basement walls. The founda- tion to the plaintiffs' home had been constructed with defective concrete, causing it to crack and deteriorate prematurely. Although the plaintiffs' basement walls did not actually collapse, they suffered from severe cracking, were bowing inward, and required wood shoring for reinforce- ment, without which the walls could become unsafe at some point in the future. The plaintiffs claimed that they were covered under the policy because the deterioration of the concrete in their basement walls constituted hidden decay that had so substantially impaired their struc- tural integrity that they were in a state of collapse, as that term had been defined in Beach v. Middlesex Mutual Assurance Co. (205 Conn. 246), in which this court concluded that that the term ''collapse'' in a homeowners insurance policy, when otherwise undefined, is sufficiently ambiguous to include coverage for any substantial impairment of the structural integrity of an insured's home. The defendant filed a motion for summary judgment, asserting, inter alia, that the plaintiffs' loss was excluded under the provisions of the policy that expressly precluded coverage for the collapse of a building subject to certain exceptions that were inapplicable and that, alternatively, the plaintiffs' claim fell within an express exclusion in the policy for loss caused by the collapse of the home's foundation, of which, according to the defendant, the 335 Conn. 62 JULY, 2020 63 Karas v. Liberty Ins. Corp. home's basement walls were a part. The District Court denied the defen- dant's motion as