After spring flooding triggered a landslide, the Traxler family was told "we're not even going to send an adjuster."
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Lauren Traxler thought she was doing everything right. She'd been paying Kentucky Farm Bureau for home insurance for over 20 years- since she was 18 years old, she told me. But when her family returned from spring break in April earlier this year to find their Nelson County home collapsing from a landslide triggered by heavy flooding, she learned a devastating lesson about what her policy actually covered.
"You just think, gosh, you're never gonna go through that," Traxler said. "You hear crazy stories of insurance and all these fires in California, or just different situations. You're like, oh, that'll never happen to me. But then it happens to you, and it's like real life, and you're like, this is horrible."
The nightmare began when the family noticed something was wrong the night they returned home. Traxler could hear loud cracks and pops throughout the night. The next morning, she discovered a massive crack across her youngest son's ceiling. Her husband had noticed their TV above the fireplace slowly sliding. One room in their home had shifted 14 inches.
"I went in to get my youngest son up, and like, across his whole ceiling was this huge crack, and I told my husband, I was like, I think something's wrong," Traxler recalled.
An engineer they called advised them to get out immediately. The family moved out of their home two days later and cannot move back in.
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