Earth Movement: the Exclusion That Is Not One Exclusion

Earth movement reads like one line on an exclusion list. In the published dwelling wording it is a heading with four different causes underneath it, and each one has its own way back onto a policy — an endorsement, a separate contract, a state fund, or nothing anybody will name. Buying the wrong one covers nothing at all.

Four causes filed under one heading in the form

The place to see it is a form a regulator puts up in full, rather than a summary of one. Maine’s Bureau of Insurance publishes the special-form dwelling wording — HO 00 03 05 11, Homeowners 3 – Special Form — and its exclusion is set out as a definition rather than as a single peril: “Earth Movement means: a. Earthquake, including land shock waves or tremors before, during or after a volcanic eruption; b. Landslide, mudslide or mudflow; c. Subsidence or sinkhole; or d. Any other earth movement including earth sinking, rising or shifting.”

Four lettered limbs describing four unrelated physical events. Shaking arrives in seconds from a fault that may be far away. A slope fails because water, gravity and a cut face finally disagree. Subsidence is the ground going down because something under it is gone. The fourth limb is the drafters refusing to be caught out, reaching sinking, rising and shifting nobody has named yet.

Read as a list, the paragraph says what the heading hides: this is not one judgment about one hazard. It subtracts a class of physical behavior, and everything an owner can do about it is arranged cause by cause, outside the contract, in a market organized differently in each state.

Whether nature or the crew started it makes no difference

The sentence immediately under the four limbs is the one a renovation should read twice. The exclusion states that it applies regardless of whether any of the causes above “is caused by an act of nature or is otherwise caused.”

On a finished building that clause is close to theoretical. On a site where the ground is being worked, it is the whole exposure. A bench cut into a slope for a new footing, a trench left open through a wet week, a retaining wall taken down before its replacement is designed, a dig alongside a neighboring foundation — all of those are ground moving because somebody moved it, and the wording puts them in the same place as a fault rupture. Nothing in it turns on fault, negligence or who signed the excavation plan.

On a structural job that makes shoring and sequencing more than safety decisions: they separate an event the property contract answers for from one no contract on the site was written for. And the fourth limb is broad enough that a foundation settling after a dig, with no landslide and no earthquake in the file, lands inside the same exclusion.

Fire, explosion and theft come back in after the ground stops

The exclusion does not end where most readers stop. One sentence later it gives something back: direct loss by fire, explosion or theft resulting from any of the four limbs is covered.

That write-back is small and specific, and it is why a ground loss is rarely a single-answer claim. Shaking cracks the structure and that portion is outside the contract. The same shaking shears a gas line and the building burns, and the fire portion is inside it. A site left open after a slope failure is looted, and the theft portion is inside it. One event, three settlements.

This is a different mechanism from the conditions deciding whether a dwelling form answers at all — occupancy, condition and disclosure are their own set of sentences and run before any of this. The write-back assumes a live contract and an excluded peril, then hands back three named consequences.

The glass sentence, and the one thing a vacant house keeps

There is a second place the same form gives earth movement back, and it is easy to miss because it sits nowhere near the exclusion. Among the additional coverages, the glass provision covers breakage of glass or safety glazing material that is part of a covered building, storm door or storm window “when caused directly by earth movement.”

Then it does something stranger. The same provision withdraws on a dwelling that has been vacant for more than 60 consecutive days immediately before the loss — and carves earth movement out of its own withdrawal, so breakage resulting directly from ground movement survives the bar that kills the rest. On a project that will sit empty through the work and again through the listing, that is the single most durable thing in this family, and it is glass.

It is also a sign the form is not being careless when it excludes the class. It knows which consequences of ground movement it will price, and it wrote them down one at a time.

An eruption is covered and its tremors are not, on the same page

The clearest proof that this is a family rather than a peril is what the form does with a volcano. Volcanic Eruption appears on the form’s own list of perils insured against — and that peril, the wording says, “does not include loss caused by earthquake, land shock waves or tremors.” The exclusion picks up the other half: its first limb reaches earthquake “including land shock waves or tremors before, during or after a volcanic eruption.”

So one geological event is cut down the middle by two provisions in one document. What falls out of the sky is a covered cause; what travels through the ground is an excluded one. Nevada’s Division of Insurance describes the same split from the market side, setting the covered causes out as a chart whose columns are policy forms, with volcanic eruption among the named perils on its basic form and seismic damage not covered under most policies and normally reached by an endorsement.

One department groups four perils; the state next door splits them

Hold two regulators side by side and the family stops being an abstraction. Utah’s Insurance Department names flood, earthquake, earth movement and mudslide together as examples of perils not typically covered, and gives all four a single route: coverage for these perils can be obtained by endorsement, or by individual policies. One sentence, four causes, one answer — and on a Utah file that is what a reader takes away.

Oregon’s Division of Financial Regulation, one state over, refuses to group them. It gives earthquake two named routes, a separate endorsement or a stand-alone policy. Then it gives landslide its own line, and the line is not a route: landslides (earth movement) “are not covered. This type of coverage may be difficult to obtain.” The advice that follows is to talk to an agent — a department declining to name a product because there may not be one. An Oregon rehab on a cut slope is therefore in a different position from one worried about shaking, and the same endorsement does not move between them.

Two more shapes sit alongside those. Tennessee’s Department of Commerce and Insurance is explicit that traditional policies do not cover earthquake damage, and says so in a state it describes as holding two seismic zones, New Madrid in the west and East Tennessee in the east — exposure stated with no route printed beside it. Nevada’s division names one route and calls it the normal one. Four departments, four pictures of one paragraph.

Two coal states where the route back is not an endorsement at all

Under the subsidence limb, two states have arranged something that is not a product you add to a property policy.

Pennsylvania sells it itself. The Department of Environmental Protection runs Mine Subsidence Insurance, and its own page says the cover “covers losses from earth movement and damage from the collapse of underground coal and clay mines in Pennsylvania”, offered because the ordinary residential contract usually does not include it. Read one line further and there is a sentence written for this trade: coverage “would be for complete and under-construction buildings,” which is a state program saying out loud that it will answer for a building the crew has not finished. It also publishes a mapping tool so an owner can check whether an address sits above old workings, which makes the ground a due-diligence item on a Pennsylvania acquisition rather than a renewal conversation.

Kentucky reaches the identical peril from the opposite direction. Its Department of Insurance keeps a review requirements checklist for residential property filings, and on the subsidence row it records that “Subsidence damage coverage must be included for structures, unless waived in writing by the insured, on policies issued or renewed in counties not exempted.” Two rows and one page away, the earthquake row on the same checklist says only that coverage and deductibles shall be made available on habitational risks.

That is one document, one family, two opposite defaults. Shaking is an offer somebody has to accept. Mine collapse is a coverage somebody has to refuse, in writing — which means on a Kentucky purchase, a waiver signed by a prior owner is a piece of paper worth finding before closing, and the absence of one is worth just as much.

The endorsement answers only when the shaking is the direct cause

The route that does exist almost everywhere has a condition on it that people assume away. Missouri’s Department of Commerce and Insurance states that earthquake coverage must be bought as a separate endorsement or as a stand-alone policy, and then adds, on the same page, that this type of insurance requires the earthquake to be the direct cause of the damage — noting that a quake can trigger other events, and giving waves and resulting flooding as its example.

So the endorsement is not a general ground-damage product. It is a cause-specific one, with the same directness test the form’s own write-back uses from the other side, and a loss that travels through a second peril can leave it on the way. The department also states that the material the building is made of can determine whether the home is insurable for this peril at all, and that some insurers will not write it on masonry. On a Missouri brick house in the New Madrid-exposed part of the state, that is a decision made at the auction, not at renewal, and it sits in the acquisition math alongside everything else that moves the number on a project.

Real-World Scenario: The exposure gets checked once, in the singular, and that is where this goes wrong. An investor takes on a brick cottage on a hillside lot and asks the agent whether earth movement is covered. It is not, an earthquake endorsement is quoted and bound, and everybody considers the ground question settled. In month two the crew cuts into the uphill bank to widen the footprint, leaves the face open across a wet stretch, and the bank comes down against the rear wall. The claim is presented on the endorsement and declined: the loss is landslide, the endorsement answers shaking, and the exclusion in the underlying contract applies whether the movement was natural or caused by the work. Nothing about the placement was careless. The word on the exclusion list was read as a peril when it was a heading.

Four questions to put to a forms list, one for each cause

None of this needs an underwriter to answer. It needs the declarations page, the forms list and four separate questions.

First, find the exclusion itself and read its lettered limbs rather than its title, so you know which of the four causes the address is actually exposed to. Second, read the sentence underneath them about an act of nature or otherwise, and decide whether the scope of work puts the crew inside it. Third, for whatever you are buying back, get the cause named on the paper: an earthquake endorsement or a stand-alone earthquake policy answers shaking, and nothing in either designation says landslide. Fourth, ask the state-level question separately — whether a mine subsidence program exists where the house sits, and whether a prior waiver is sitting in the file.

Then read the two places the wording gives something back, because a summary loses both: the fire, explosion and theft write-back at the foot of the exclusion, and the glass provision that survives a vacant stretch when nothing else does. On a light finish-work project that may be the whole of the ground conversation. Where the work opens the building or moves dirt, the placement is the bigger question, and the construction contract on the structure and the endorsed dwelling form on a cosmetic job carry their own exclusion lists to read the same way. With the soil report and the scope of work both in hand, send them over together.