Mold, one of the most serious threats to your home. It created chaos in households across Texas and in Kansas it is the single largest destructor of personal property.
While many insurance companies do not include mold as a named peril in their policies, there are a few that speak in favour of including this humidity loving fungus.
What is mold?
Mold basically results from the damp or still water. It can start off as tiny spores on walls or inside damp cupboards and attics. Black and green mold, fungus, wet rot, dry rot and bacteria, black mildew and toxic fungus are the different versions of mold. Homeowners across Kansas and Texas and even parts of California have claimed that mold is hazardous to their health. Yet there is no national declaration in this regard. More than 1,000 types of mold occur naturally in the United States and need only the presence of water to thrive.
Mold Insurance and how to go about it
This is not exactly a part of the standard homeowners insurance policy. In fact if mold develops from standing water or from something other than a covered loss, it is explicitly excluded from your insurance cover.
This holds true for Kansas among other western states. Some companies do pay cleanup and repair costs for mold damage resulting from a covered loss, such as a broken pipe, while others level a ceiling on how much can be paid to repair mold damage resulting from standing water.
In recent years, this problem has hiked up rates and cost billions of dollars to insurance companies and homeowners alike.
In fact when you purchase your homeowners policy, be clear with regard to what you are covered for. The Insurance Commissioner's office advises you to be alert when purchasing a homeowner's policy. If you're concerned about black mold, make sure you ask about it specifically. The department of insurance for Kansas answers all concerns about your policy.
Mold Tax
Insurance companies have recently come up with an additional $147 "mold tax" in the average Kansas homeowner's insurance bill. However of late, Kansas and Missouri are among 35 states that went ahead with mold limitations for homeowners insurance. The limitation allowed insurers to exclude cover for loss caused by mold and wet or dry rot unless the conditions resulted from a covered peril.
While some insurance carriers maintain that mold could be counted among the "sudden and accidental" losses that homeowner's policies are designed to cover, others felt that it always had been the insurer's intention to exclude mold damage from coverage.
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