Equipment Breakdown

Equipment breakdown covers mechanical and electrical failure of building systems: boilers, chillers, elevators, emergency generators, refrigeration, and increasingly the electronic systems a facility depends on. Standard property policies exclude these failures because they are not a fortuitous external event.

In senior care several of these systems are licensure-critical rather than merely inconvenient. Loss of heating or cooling in a facility with a frail resident population is a health emergency that can force evacuation and draw a regulatory response. An emergency generator failure during an outage is both a life safety issue and a survey issue. An elevator out of service in a multi-story building can render upper floors unusable for residents who cannot use stairs. So the coverage that matters is not the repair cost, which is often modest, but the resulting business income and extra expense, including evacuation and temporary systems. Confirm those consequential coverages are included and that generators and elevators are scheduled as covered equipment.