By Zack Harold
The Charleston Daily Mail
GLASGOW, W.Va. — A “clerical error” led a Kanawha County volunteer fire department to shut down last weekend, but an even larger error may have left the department without workers’ compensation coverage earlier this year.
Early Sunday morning, Glasgow Fire Chief Marty Blankenship asked Kanawha County Metro 911 to mark the town’s volunteer fire department completely out of service.
He had received a letter from BrickStreet Mutual Insurance Saturday informing him that the department no longer had workers’ compensation insurance because its bill had not been paid.
But that wasn’t correct.
Greg Burton, BrickStreet’s president and CEO, said that when the fire department set up its policy in April, the department was to make two payments-one in April and one in September.
The company’s computer system mistakenly set up the department with a three-payment policy, with payments scheduled for April, July, and September, causing the company to send out a cancellation notice.
“They didn’t make that payment because they weren’t supposed to make that payment,” Burton said. He said the fire department never lost its workers’ comp coverage, and the error was entirely on BrickStreet’s part.
But Burton said the fire department did go without coverage from January to April of this year because their payment was never received. He said BrickStreet didn’t receive any money from the department until April, when its current policy began.
Blankenship says he was unaware of the loss of coverage and, as far as he knew, his fire department had paid its policy.
“That’s the reason come October, we’re probably going to be shopping around to find another insurance company,” Blankenship said.
He said errors of this sort are not uncommon with BrickStreet, and other departments have had similar problems. He said no one was hurt during the months when the department supposedly was without coverage.
Chesapeake Volunteer Fire Chief Steve Johnson said his department’s workers’ compensation coverage was mistakenly canceled a couple of years ago.
He said BrickStreet would send out bills and follow them up with termination notices just days later.
“It takes longer than 10 days to process bills for a fire department,” Johnson said.
Johnson also said BrickStreet’s unsolicited mail looks so similar to its invoices it’s possible important mail was accidentally discarded.
Brickstreet handles all the workers’ compensation coverage for West Virginia volunteer fire departments.
Burton said both the Glasgow and Chesapeake departments would have been duly notified when their insurance was canceled.
“Typically we send out a quote 60 days prior to the policy expiring, so something would have gone out to him,” he said.
Burton said if BrickStreet doesn’t hear anything after the 60-day notice, it sends a notice 30 days before a policy expires. He said he doesn’t know what happened with Chesapeake’s cancellation or Glasgow’s from earlier this year, but if an error occurred, BrickStreet would have fixed it.
“Sometimes errors are made and we try to correct them as quickly as we can,” Burton said.
Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper voiced concerns about the mix-up.
“I think that volunteer fire departments, like everybody else, have a very difficult time in managing day-to-day things like insurance and bills that are owed,” he said. “A volunteer fire chief’s got enough problems just getting enough manpower and people to go fight a fire.”
Carper said perhaps the county should provide fire departments with assistance in handling more bureaucratic matters such as insurance policies and state regulations. He also said protocol should be established for stations going out of service so areas are properly protected in case of an emergency.
Blankenship said he only did what was necessary.
“This thing got blown way out of proportion. The only thing we were doing was being proactive, but no one ever suffered a chance of not being covered,” he said.
Glasgow’s fire department actually has two components, one paid and the other volunteer. Seven paid firefighters never went off-duty and when the volunteer fire department was put out of service, the town’s mutual aid agreement with the Cedar Grove Volunteer Fire Department went from a 12-hour agreement to 24 hours.
“They have enough manpower; they handled everything,” Blankenship said.
Blankenship said non-volunteers never lost their coverage because they’re under the town’s workers’ comp program.
Copyright 2009 Charleston Newspapers