Shaffer v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co.

Plaintiff brought this action to recover on an insurance policy issued by defendant for damage to his rental home caused by his tenant’s use of the home as a methamphetamine laboratory. After a jury verdict for plaintiff, the trial court granted defendant’s motion for directed verdict on the ground that the damage was excluded from policy coverage as a “contamination.”

The policy exclusion is substantively the same as the one we considered in Largent v. State Farm Fire & Casualty Co., 116 Or App 559, 842 P2d 447 (1992). There, we held that, as a matter of law, the exclusion does not apply to…