A person responsible for preparing claim files for victims of damages due to a fire complained to the Ombudsman de Montréal because, in more than 100 cases (some of which from many years back), she was unable to obtain from the Service de sécurité incendie de Montréal (the “SIM”) the Rapports généraux d’intervention (“RGI”) containing the information required by insurance companies before they fully compensate the blaze victims. These reports are generally prepared by firemen, after their intervention at the fire scene.
According to our investigation, many of these reports had simply not been prepared at the time of the disaster and in the absence of much of the information normally contained in these detailed reports, many insurance claims had remained incomplete. As a result, numerous citizens had not been fully compensated or not compensated at all by their insurer. We found this situation to be clearly unacceptable.
The Ombudsman de Montréal, therefore, intervened and looked for a solution. We identified which minimum information was required by insurers and we moved on to explore, with the SIM, how such information could be provided to them. Representatives of the SIM collaborated well and they accepted to prepare, in each concerned file, a new type of document, “Attestation d’intervention des pompiers de Montréal”, containing the said minimum information. These Attestations were forwarded to the person handling these claims: with this new information, she completed the requests so that insurers could proceed with all the payments owed to the victims.
