Tales from the insurance files

• Above: Janet Stein in front of the Zipper, the iconic sculpture that — years ago — was routinely and illicitly relocated by clever engineering students competing in an annual scavenger hunt. It was up to Stein and her team to arrange funding for its safe return to the Science Theatres.

Since Janet Stein, director of risk management and insurance, started working at UCalgary 30 years ago, her department has managed more than 3,700 claims. Stein and her team respond to all sorts of incidents — as part of their responsibilities, they open and oversee claims and manage emergency response cleanup and remediation. If there were damages, you can bet that Stein helped fix them. As she celebrates her 30-year milestone, Stein looks back on some of her most memorable experiences at the university.

The one where the sky was falling, 2009

“A meteor fell from the sky and pieces of it landed in farmers’ fields in Saskatchewan,” says Stein.

The fireball known as the Buzzard Coulee meteorite is actually just the beginning of Stein’s story — the real incident occurred months later when volunteers from surrounding areas were helping UCalgary researchers recover fallen meteorites before the planting season. The volunteers parked their cars near a group of young male Clydesdales and set out to hunt for space rocks.

Once the humans left, the horses got territorial and things took a damaging turn. They smashed down on the car hoods and trunks with their heavy hooves and tore moulding from the doors with their teeth. When the car owners returned, the Clydesdales ran off — leaving Stein to sort out the coverage for repairs. 

The one that cost the most, 2010

“I just emailed the YouTube link to the claims manager for our insurer and said, ‘So, this happened — I’ll be calling you,’” Stein says.

The footage (see video below) captures hail smashing through the glass of the rooftop greenhouse on Science A, but damage done by the memorable 2010 hailstorm didn’t stop there. Golf-ball-sized hailstones ravaged the roof of the not-yet-completed Taylor Family Digital Library, which was initially built from innovative energy-saving materials — which were replaced using more traditional, hail-resistant technology. The record-breaking hailstorm caused damages all over campus and was the largest total claim in UCalgary history.

The one with the basement mystery, 2000  

“We were wading through knee-deep mud in the dark basement,” says Stein. “I’m so short that I couldn’t keep up, and I didn’t have my own headlamp. You could hear rushing water in the elevator shaft and the sound of mud sucking around our boots. It was like a horror movie when you want to shout at the screen, ‘Why did you go in the basement?!”’

This was the scene when Stein arrived to Cascade Hall after it started filling from the ground up with water, mud, sticks and debris from an unidentified source. It wasn’t until Stein and others took a breather outside and noticed a reflection of the moon shining on what should have been dry cement in the distance.

Turns out, the underground irrigation lines had ruptured and completely saturated the surrounding ground with water. Eventually, the subterranean pressure got so intense that it forced the mud and muck through any accessible crevasses, cracks and gaps in the building foundation — the mud level reached five feet in one room.

The one with the moose on the loose, 2008

“There was glass and moose blood everywhere,” Stein says.

The moose wasn’t too badly hurt, but he did need help after jumping headlong through a glass window and trapping himself in the connecting hallway between Craigie Hall E and the Reeve Theatre — that’s where Stein found the moose when she arrived.

Back then, she was incident commander during emergencies. She and the Campus Security team secured the scene, but there wasn’t much else to be done until Alberta Fish and Wildlife arrived to tranquilize and relocate the moose.

The one with the perfect storm, 2011 

“It was the perfect storm claim,” says Stein. “It wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t lose heat to the building the same day they were making roof repairs on the same night that the temperature was down to 30 degrees below zero.”

The cold flowed in freely through small gaps in the roof of the Health Science Centre on Foothills Campus. With no working heat in the building, it didn’t take long for the whole building to freeze. Pipes and water lines burst, and there was flooding in various locations throughout the building.

Stein got the call at 5 a.m. and arrived on the scene even before the all the pipes were turned off. It was UCalgary’s second-priciest claim to date.

The one that hasn’t happened yet

Stein and her team don’t just respond to what has already happened. They also work with stakeholders across the university to ensure that if UCalgary is vulnerable to a risk, that risk is assessed and mitigated.

Currently, Stein’s team is working to standardize a specialized volunteer software that will make it easier to recruit, onboard, train and track volunteers — it will become an important part of UCalgary’s process for ensuring volunteers are accounted for and covered in case of incident. Stay tuned for more information.  

Learn more about Risk Management and Insurance and how they play their part in travel, international emergency response, events, insurance, driving, vehicles and more at the University of Calgary.