THE BACK PAGE: Samson still struggling with insurance claim

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This article was published 29/11/2019 (2353 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You feel the icy draft the moment you step into Phil Dorn’s office. A padded orange tarp is all that’s between him and the great outdoors. Traffic on 10th Street roars by constantly with nothing to muffle its sound. Insulation has dropped to the floor and exposed boards sit forlornly where a finished wall once stood.

At Samson Engineering, this has been the situation for more than two years. A massive support column is completely broken, its open maw displaying the thickness of its interior and the heft of its weight. Two new steel structures were put in place to hold up the second floor of the building after the original column was destroyed.

This story began at approximately 4 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 6, 2017, when a 12-year-old boy stole a car, went for a joyride, blew through a red light and hit a Brandon Transit bus, forcing it to plow into the east side of Samson Engineering’s headquarters at the corner of 10th and Princess.

If there’s any silver lining to this, it’s that Samson closes at noon on Fridays, so Dorn and his employees weren’t there when the accident happened. Otherwise, the outcome could have been even more devastating.

“I would have been seriously hurt, or worse,” Dorn said. “Whole bricks came flying through the room. If I’d have been sitting here ….”

Also, he said, if the bus hadn’t hit the support column, there could have been a tragedy of enormous proportions, since there were passengers on board.

“The bus would have been in the basement,” Dorn said quietly, letting the implications of that sink in.

In addition to cosmetic damage, the structural damage to the building is extensive. Everything, from the front of the building to the back, is misaligned. The door to Dorn’s office won’t close because its frame and the wall are twisted. Glance at the ceiling and you notice right away that it’s crooked — that things aren’t square the way they should be.

“The forces that were transferred through the building were just tremendous,” Dorn said. “All the way to the back alley, things are broken. So it’s a huge undertaking to begin to figure this out. You take a building that was constructed out of structural steel — and it’s structural steel that is ductile, meaning it can move a little bit and come back. But it has a brittle facade, meaning brick and mortar, and when the building moves and comes back, the brittle facade is going to crack tremendously. And then you’ve got problems with your building envelope system, because now you have the potential of water going into those cracks and freeze/thaw cycling destroying the brick.”

So why isn’t the building fixed now? Why wasn’t it fixed a long time ago? Samson is an engineering firm, after all. What’s with the delay?

“There is a tremendous amount of structural damage,” Dorn restated. “And I guess the question is, in the insurer’s mind, how to deal with it. You can deal with it really quickly and straight up and go ahead and do it. But it’s insurance. What am I going to do?”

Dorn said his insurer, Aviva Insurance Company of Canada, is not giving him grief in terms of covering the costs of the repair. But his frustration with the situation was evident.

“They’re just not doing anything,” he said. “You can speculate as to what reason that might be. Initially, there was some concern that they were just going to patch it up. And I said, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ We have some knowledge of the codes, so that kind of played into that equation. Then the second thing is they didn’t sort of anticipate, or do their due diligence to anticipate, the magnitude of what happened. “So what are we going to do? I could work myself up into a lather, but what’s the point? We’ve just got to go on. But we’re going into the third winter now with an insulated tarp between me and 40 below.”

I called Aviva to try to get a comment from them on the situation, but as I anticipated, because it’s “an ongoing claim and legal matter,” they declined to provide me with any information. Which is unfortunate, because it would have been great to get their perspective and some insight into why it’s taking so much time to resolve this issue. But this isn’t the first problem Dorn has had with the company.

He had a previous claim for another accident that happened on Dec. 24th of 2016 a vehicle smashed into Samson Engineering’s front door. Dorn said he fixed the door, but now, almost three years later, he still hasn’t been compensated by Aviva. “I have never in my life anticipated that the insurance process would be like this,” he said.

As our conversation progressed, I told Dorn I was doing this column because people around town had been wondering why the building is still in disrepair. I suggested the situation must be particularly frustrating for an engineering firm. “You kind of nailed it,” Dorn said. “We, I feel, are vulnerable in that respect. This is our business and we can’t even fix our own building?”

Dorn isn’t certain, but he wonders if Aviva perhaps wants to subrogate all or part of the claim to Manitoba Public Insurance. So I called MPI to see if they could offer any insight. But they, too, declined to comment due to “client confidentiality.”

So why doesn’t Dorn just fix his building? After the door episode, he’s not willing to take that risk again.

“If I go ahead and do it, I’m sure they would penalize me tremendously for doing that,” he said. “So I can’t. And the other thing is, there’s a tremendous amount of money. It’s well north of a million.”

And there’s more: Samson now has insurance with another company because Dorn was and is still dissatisfied with the way his claims have been handled. And to make the engineering offices habitable, there are space heaters throughout.

“Which is a fire hazard,” Dorn said. “So what if it burns down now? Who’s on the hook for this? It’s just a circus. It’s a really unfortunate happenstance.

“At the end of the day, can I just get my building fixed please? That’s the issue. And then we can put this behind us and go on with life.”

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