Court Opinion

ID: 9683734
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 13:36:05.819851+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:17:50.011352
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Wilson
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent for the reason that the majority decision here seems to be in conflict with the very recent decision of Glens Falls Ins. Co. v. McCown, 149 Texas 587, 236 S. W. 2d 108.
The majority holds that the definition- found in paragraph A of the policy of “collision and upset” as not including loss caused by flood cannot be considered with paragraph B-l, and, therefore, the express provision that collision and upset shall not include damage by water or flood does not limit Coverage B-l. In this I differ with them. The entire policy should be construed as a unit and the definition of each coverage should be carefully compared for overlap or exclusion in order to determine just what was and was not purchased.
In Glens Falls Ins. Co. v. McCown, supra, this court held:
“The coverages offered but rejected are in the policy (under the direction of the Insurance Commission) the same as are those offered and accepted, therefore it is proper to consider all of them in determining the respective obligations and rights of the parties to the policy.”
In the case at bar, the majority, in construing the sentence in Coverage A saying that “loss caused by * * * flood * * * shall not be deemed loss caused by * * * collision or upset”, holds:
“The obvious purpose of this provision was to enlarge the liability of petitioner under Coverage A. ******* If petitioner had intended the language used in the last sentence of Coverage A (enlarging its liability under that coverage) to be used also to restrict its liability under Coverage B-l, the same language could have been written into Coverage B-l as a limitation of liability.”
*214The majority requires here that each coverage be defined within its own paragraph. This gives “collision and upset” a meaning different under Coverage A from that in the same policy under Coverage B-l. If I understand the majority correctly, this conflicts with the rule of construction announced in the Glens Falls case that “it is proper to consider all of them (the coverage paragraphs) in determining the respective obligations and rights of the parties”. If each coverage must be complete in itself, there would be no occasion to consider coverages not purchased in order to define a coverage purchased, as the court did in the Glens Falls case, supra, and as the court is refusing to do here. The following quotation from the Glens Falls case shows clearly that in that case the court used the words of Coverage F to help define and delimit Coverage E:
“That the damage done to respondent’s automobile was caused by a flood cannot be seriously questioned. That Coverage E’s protection against external discharge or leakage of water did not include, and was not meant to include, an unprecedented overflow of the Trinity River onto a large portion of the City of Fort Worth is made perfectly clear by reference to Coverage F, which offered to insure respondent not only against external discharge or leakage of water but against flood or rising water as well. Since respondent did not accept and pay for Coverage F, he ‘expressly failed to cover the very damage sued for’ and cannot recover.”
The majority uses the settled rule that a policy is construed liberally in favor of the insured and strictly against the insurer to arrive at the result that the sentence in question enlarged the liability under Coverage A but did not restrict liability under Coverage B-l. The fallacy in this is that the sentence in question is a definition of a term which should be used consistently throughout the entire policy. Here the majority is not construing ambiguous words, but is refusing to apply a definition because that definition is not repeated in paragraph B-l.
The purpose of excluding flood damage from “collision and upset” was to distinguish between two clearly different types of insurable risks in order that the purchaser of insurance might fit his purchase to his need. This is for the convenience of the general public. In order to sell these insurable risks as separate packages, the insurer needs a clear demarcation between them so that a fair and proper premium may be determined from loss experience, and so that an insurer may maintain proper reserves against its outstanding policies. Judicial construction which tends to confuse two such completely different risks as *215that commonly thought of as collision with that commonly thought of as flood negatives the desirable objective of separating the risks so that flood insurance and collision insurance can be sold separately.
Restricting the sentence in question to the paragraph on Coverage A opens up overlaps between Coverage B-l (collision upset) and Coverage C (fire), Coverage D-l and D-2 (theft), Coverage E (windstorm, earthquake, explosion, hail or water), and Coverage F (combined additional coverage) which do not exist if the sentence be regarded as a general definition, for the sentence is not repeated anywhere else in the policy.
Words in an insurance policy should be given a common and ordinary meaning because these contracts are offered for sale to the public generally. As I understand the majority opinion, a flood which might rise and recede so gently that it exerted no force upon an automobile would not be a collision, but a flood which exerts some degree of force upon an automobile is a collision. I draw this conclusion from the majority’s holding “that the force of the floodwaters against the automobile was a collision within the meaning of the language of Coverage B-l.” I cannot believe that either the insurer or the insured intended,, the word collision to have such a meaning.
Opinion delivered April 25, 1951.
Motion for rehearing overruled May 30, 1951.