ISO has recommend changes to certain of its insurance forms effective April 2013.  Form CG 00 35 04 13 addresses Railroad Protective Liability Coverage.  The new change includes broader language for losses relating to fuels and lubricants.

Any railroad requesting Protective Liability coverage should consider using this new form – in lieu of the old one.    

fueling

In the old version, last revised in 2000, a standard ISO Railroad Protective Liability Policy provided coverage for losses that arose out of the “escape of fuel or lubricants from equipment used at the job location.”  (Emphasis added).

The new form effective now removes the words “escape” and “from.”  The effect of this change adds more coverage to the policy for losses.  It now reads:

  2.  Exclusions

         This insurance does not apply to:

                           * * *

        f. Pollution           

“Bodily injury” or “property damage” arising out of the actual, alleged or threatened discharge, dispersal, seepage, migration, release or escape of “pollutants” at or from the “job location:”

* * *

(3)   On which you or “contractors” working directly or indirectly on any insured’s behalf are performing operations if the “pollutants” are brought on or to the “job location” in connection with such operations by you, the “contractor” or “your designated employee.”  However this subparagraph does not apply to:

(a)   “Bodily injury” or “property damage” arising out of fuels or lubricants for equipment used at the “job location.”

 (Emphasis added for understanding).  What the new language excluded in the pollution clause, it later added back in the exception to the exclusion found at 2.f.(3)(a).

An example of what this new language may cover could include an accidental fuel spill by a contractor’s employee at a job site for fueling locomotives.  I emphasis the word “may” because each policy can be different, which would change coverage.  And the facts of a certain situation may also change coverage.