Your Portable Sanitation or Septic Insurance Probably Has a Gap You Don't Know About.
I specialize exclusively in liquid waste, portable sanitation, and septic operators. Most of the operators I work with were with a generalist who never asked the right questions.
The Three Gaps
Gap 1:
Your Vacuum Truck Spill Creates a Coverage Black Hole
When a vacuum truck rolls on a highway, your auto policy and your GL policy will both point at each other. Neither one covers the environmental cleanup costs. That gap is real, it's common, and it's fixable, but only if someone structures the program correctly from the start.
Gap 2:
Your GL Policy Excludes Your Core Operations
The standard commercial general liability pollution exclusion eliminates coverage for transporting, handling, and disposing of liquid waste and septage. Most operators find this out after a claim. A properly structured program builds pollution coverage back in from the ground up, not as an afterthought.
Gap 3:
Your Workers Comp Is Probably Misclassified
Drivers, field technicians, and drain field installers carry different NCCI class codes with meaningfully different rates. Misclassification either costs you money on premium or leaves you exposed in an audit. Getting it right is one of the first things I look at on every program review.
You Work in a Tough Industry. Your Insurance Should Actually Cover It.
I'm Justin MacKenzie, a commercial insurance producer at First West Insurance in Bozeman, Montana. I work exclusively with portable sanitation operators, septic pumpers, vacuum truck fleets, and liquid waste haulers and the excavation contractors who install and service the systems these operators maintain. I understand your exposures, I know the specialty markets that actually write this class, and I'm not going to hand you a policy and move on.
If you want to know whether your current program actually covers what happens when something goes wrong on a job, call me.
406-922-6025