Our Trip To The Cabin
reason: Wawanesa REFUSED to do ANY exploration on our insurance claim. Wawanesa even used a reason NOT in the report (a report produced by their associates for the purpose of assessing the claim) to deny it as did the Wawanesa Northern Alberta Ombuds Service……so WE, the ill equipped and uneducated insured, had to do this dangerous work completely ourselves. A cause was manufactured between the report being written and the denial letter being written. Manufactured out of thin air.
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time: we left home at 9 am, worked solid at the cabin, ate dinner at 9:50 pm (no lunch) and returned home at 12:17 AM (a 15 hour work day….with our children)
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temperature: below zero, freezing temperatures in an unheated building
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cast: my husband, myself, and our 5 children. One child had no feeling in their feet. One child was so cold they curled up into a ball and fell asleep. One child was panicked that the cabin would collapse on them. Wawanesa expects their insured to carry out their own exploration with their children in unsafe buildings.
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safety: four different people fell through the floor including one very bad fall and our 10 year old daughter FALLING THROUGH THE FLOOR. We were expected to deal with slicing open walls concealing electrical and water, deal with mold, debris, falls, rusty nails, insulation, ice, water, and there was also some very old tile (that may or may not contain asbestos…it would be from “that” era). This is with 5 children roaming around in a freezing cold building. Clearly safety isn’t one of Wawanesa’s top concerns, denying claims on items NOT EVEN IN THE REPORT is their main focus.
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just for fun: Wawanesa delayed dealing with this claim until it was so late in the year that we wouldn’t have water to prove the claim because our water is seasonal (manipulative?) . They also delayed it so long that we are unable to fix the situation, claim or not, jeopardizing and compromising our investment through their petty manipulative ways. By the way, we were forced to do this NOW as the report Wawanesa accepted had LIES about when we discovered the problem. We discovered the problem on September 7, 2014….the report said “approximately 2 years ago”. I even have a blog post up showing discovery. Perhaps not “fun” but very dishonest business.
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Stay tuned…………..if Wawanesa continues to ignore us there WILL be video…..a lot of video…..
(it shows exactly what they are putting us through as they REFUSED to do exploration even though they sent out a restoration crew who on site REFUSED to look further…….I sense a lot of YouTube in my future…….if a picture is worth 1000 words, a video also adds 1000 emotions and a whole lot of context and reality)
PROBLEMS WITH WAWANESA INSURANCE?
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PS. By the way we have been told TWICE that we HAD to do our OWN EXPLORATION. The first time was by the Townsend & Leedham adjuster,hired out by Wawanesa, on September 29, 2014. The second is indicated in the letter from the Wawanesa Northern Alberta Ombuds Service that states “”If YOU are able to determine that the loss is not……” etc. ….after all the construction professionals supplied by the insurance industry refused to LOOK.
One more PS. …..two interesting things, first the letter from the Ombuds Service isn’t SIGNED by anyone, no one would take responsibility. Second, the independent adjuster didn’t forward all the clauses in our insurance policy to us, only items 7-12, concealing the rest. The independent adjuster went through our policy, tried to find a clause to get them out of the claim, even though it WAS NOT in the report, and then consciously conceals the rest of our policy from us so that we can not see what is actually covered. MANIPULATION or CORRUPT…you choose (I’m easy going).
If you want to read more about this situation click HERE (the discovery)
and HERE (the October 5th post)
and HERE ( lies on the insurance report……..we found even more today!!!)
Oh, and one more little thing…….if our suspicions are right, we “followed the water”, we now suspect why we only had one septic pump out this year (compared to three or four in previous years)…….just a hunch…..but then we can’t “prove” it as WAWANESA manipulated the situation so that we would have no water to prove the claim.
Can you think of any other reason it takes 3 weeks to get an adjuster out to look at an interior water claim?….and that has happened TWICE with this claim….they consciously delayed the process knowing that the water would do more and more damage ……just saying…….the calendar doesn’t lie….6 weeks of delays……for interior lying water. We couldn’t “secure” the situation because they had to “see” the water. We were forced by Wawanesa to let our property deteriorate.
h..... the blog 
Hmm- looks like some interesting construction. I’m not a big insurance guy in the first place as it seems like a form of gambling where the dealer usually wins. Our house isn’t insured – if it’s broken I fix it, if it burns down we do something else. If I were you I’d count my blessings in being the one to investigate and REALLY see the extent of the problems. Tear out the tub, expose everything, clean it up and put it back together the way YOU want it done – and cancel your insurance policy.
Well luckily I have my blog to express my frustrations and there is a real justice in it as every time someone clicks on the blog post it drives it up higher in a Google search when someone searches Wawanesa. I might just make it my winter time project to keep Wawanesa problems showing up on line everywhere and in all social media.
I am really miffed how they dragged out things. 78 days from the day we reported it to the day they denied leaving it full of water. They also left it long enough that we have no water to prove our claim. Their dragging it out also means the place will sit full of water until May when it warms up enough to work. Within a few weeks it will be colder in the cabin than outside; the water that flowed had created sheets of ice already. technically there poor management is causing our property to deteriorate.
It is weird, in the spring we were talking about pulling two of our places from Wawanesa….it was a gut feeling…..we should have acted.
The one saving grace is I know it isn’t just us, through my “insurance insider” I see how they are short cutting on claims and really messing people about. A picture I saw a few days ago of a Wawanesa “solution” was shockingly bad.
We will get it fixed, and it will be a better job than who they would bring in……..but I’m not going quietly!
This is terrible.
It is horrible and insurance has been a nightmare to deal with right from the very first phone call with the independent adjuster….even before seeing the property.
In an attempt to turn a “horrible experience” into an “experience”, the other night we wrote an idea pitch based on the cabin and a little bit of Pender and we are sending it off to HGTV. We figured “why not?” and our oldest son was keen as….to quote him….”it will help him with the ladies”.
With our labor, at a preliminary guess, we think a $5-6K fix…in our minds we are going with $10K.
If you are ever our for a drive west of Edmonton we can show you the disaster. It is so shockingly bad that it is almost worth seeing.
I think it is perfect for one of the HGTV shows. Let me know if it goes on one. That would be something Holmes and Holmes could fix!! Good luck, I hope it catches their attention!