Is Sudden Pollution
Covered by My GL?
No, and this is one of the most persistent myths in contractor insurance. On a modern general liability form the speed of the release does not matter. Sudden and gradual are both excluded.
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The longer answer
With the sources, so you can check us.
The industry stopped selling that giveback decades ago
Insurance reference IRMI states that in the late 1980s the US insurance industry “completely abandoned the use of ‘sudden and accidental’ coverage givebacks in the pollution exclusion on GL policies,” and that true sudden-and-accidental exceptions “have not been available to purchase in the US insurance market place for decades.”
What replaced it
The absolute pollution exclusion arrived in 1985 and 1986 and made the speed of release immaterial. What exists today are time element exceptions, where coverage applies only if a release begins and ends inside a discrete window, usually measured in hours.
Why you still hear it
IRMI is blunt about this: thirty-plus years later, insurance marketers still describe limited exceptions as “sudden and accidental pollution coverage” instead of time element exceptions. If you have been told your GL covers sudden spills, ask to see the endorsement.
Where the distinction is still real
In contractors pollution liability, which by definition responds to pollution conditions that are sudden or gradual. That is the policy where the words still mean something.
Sources: IRMI, the sudden and accidental pollution coverage myth
What this means for your business
- Insurance reference IRMI states that in the late 1980s the US insurance industry “completely abandoned the use of ‘sudden and accidental’ coverage givebacks in the pollution exclusion on GL policies,” and that true sudden-and-accidental exceptions “have not been available to purchase in the US insurance market place for decades.”
- The absolute pollution exclusion arrived in 1985 and 1986 and made the speed of release immaterial. What exists today are time element exceptions, where coverage applies only if a release begins and ends inside a discrete window, usually measured in hours.
- IRMI is blunt about this: thirty-plus years later, insurance marketers still describe limited exceptions as “sudden and accidental pollution coverage” instead of time element exceptions. If you have been told your GL covers sudden spills, ask to see the endorsement.
- In contractors pollution liability, which by definition responds to pollution conditions that are sudden or gradual. That is the policy where the words still mean something.
Answered by Septic Cleaning Insurance Group
We only write this trade, and we read the policy before we sell it. More on the operations we insure and the coverage behind them.
Straight answers, no insurance-speak
It is the modern replacement. Coverage applies only where a release begins and ends inside a discrete window, commonly measured in hours, and is discovered and reported within set periods. Much narrower than the phrase sudden pollution coverage suggests.
Yes. A Wisconsin septage hauler land-applied septage, nitrates reached a neighbour’s well and cattle died. The state supreme court held decomposing septage was a pollutant and the exclusion precluded coverage entirely.
They do, which is why we will not promise you an outcome. An Eleventh Circuit case found a sewage backup was not barred by an absolute pollution exclusion under Alabama law. Your form, your facts and your state all matter.
Possibly not. These answers describe standard forms and common rules; your policy may carry endorsements that change the result either way. Send the declarations and endorsement schedule and we will tell you what your form does.
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Want this answered against your actual policy?
Send the declarations and endorsements. We will tell you what your form does, not what a standard form does.
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