State Farm Florida: the homeowner's own description of a slow leak used to deny it

The evidence for this denial is the policyholder’s own account. The letter says so plainly: we noted you described the leak as being very slow and that it had been leaking for approximately a year.

That is the practical lesson in the whole archive. A homeowners policy of this type pays for sudden and accidental discharge and excludes water that leaks repeatedly or intermittently over time, so the single most consequential thing in the file is often a sentence the insured said out loud early on. Duration is the coverage question, and describing a leak as slow and long-running answers it against the claim before an adjuster inspects anything.

None of which makes the description wrong or the denial automatic. A leak can run slowly for months and then fail suddenly, and the damage from the failure is a different event from the seepage that preceded it. But that argument now has to be made against the file’s own words.