VIC: Is communal drainage overflow considered flooding under strata insurance?

Question: Is water ingress due to a communal drainage overflow classed as flooding? Resolving this will likely involve up to four insurers.

Is water ingress from communal drainage issues, in this case a faulty sump and pump, flooding? We’ve had issues as a result of stormwater overflow in a combination of water tanks that have overflowed from our next door neighbour. What is this classed as?

Water overflow is a reoccurrence and strata won’t cover us. The neighbour issues occurred at the same time. Resolving this will likely involve up to four insurers.

Answer: Unless the water has come from a lake, river, dam, canal, watercourse or other body of water in the exclusion, the flood exclusion isn’t operable.

Does this fit the definition of flood? Unless the water has come from a lake, river, dam, canal, watercourse or other body of water in the exclusion, the flood exclusion isn’t operable.

Obviously, we don’t know the full circumstances but on face value I would say that this is a claim that does not have the flood claim that is operable. You are going to need a good insurance broker to help you navigate this claim because if the insurer is saying it’s not covered, you’d want to understand why it’s not covered and know what the exclusions in the policy are that they’re referring to.

For a lot of these hypothetical scenarios, without knowing the full details and seeing hydrologist reports that might be 55 pages long, I can only give you a general overview of my thoughts. But obviously, the devil might be in the detail of those reports.

This post appears in the July 2022 edition of The VIC Strata Magazine.