Every answer and its explanation appears here once you have finished the path. Each one then links to the matching glossary entry, where the concept is set out in full with its worked example.
1. Three families of delay open three different rights. Which one traps everyone, and why?
Delay caused by an external event that damages nothing: there is no loss, so nothing to indemnify, and yet the site is genuinely stopped
The other two families each have a clear regime, contractual in one case, insurance in the other, and it is this one that surprises because it looks like a loss without being one: an external event that damages nothing opens no cover, whatever the stoppage it imposes. The consequence is brutal and worth having in mind before the rainy season: the site stops, crews stay on the payroll, and no policy responds. It is also why protection costs are only covered as emergency measures, and only if the imminence of damage can be dated.
Glossary entry →2. A flood fills an excavation that is still empty. Two weeks later, the same flood carries off waiting reinforcement and ruins concrete poured the day before. Where is the damage to the works?
In the second only: water in an empty excavation is not damage to the works, whereas a collapsing wall, washed-away reinforcement or ruined concrete are
The distinction looks byzantine and it decides the file, because it separates what must be pumped from what must be redone: filling a hole damages nothing, something built or destined to be built must have been harmed. It is the same flood on the same site two weeks apart, and the first episode yields nothing while the second opens cover. Believing a natural event never produces covered damage generalizes wrongly; seeing defective workmanship imports an exclusion where there is only an external cause.
Glossary entry →3. Where does force majeure live, and what does it produce?
In the works contract, never in the policy: it relieves from penalties, it creates no indemnity
It is a contract-law notion, and expecting it from a policy means asking an insurer to apply a mechanism that is not its own: it releases a debtor from an obligation, it creates no claim. The confusion is common because both protections are discussed in the same meeting, after the same event, with the same people. Separating them lets you put the two questions apart and in the right order: does the contractor owe penalties, and does any cover respond. The answers received can be no and no.
Glossary entry →4. A major natural event stops a site for six weeks without damaging anything. What happens to the project owner?
It bears everything: force majeure relieves the contractor of penalties and the insurer owes nothing for want of physical damage, the one case where both protections fall away together
It is the conjunction the two previous questions prepare, and it is the module's most important point: the same cause relieves on one side and opens nothing on the other, so the person who pays is the one who did nothing. Knowing it does not mechanically protect them, but it moves the discussion to the works contract, where sharing this risk is negotiated before signature and never after. The answer relying on the natural catastrophe scheme forgets that it indemnifies damage, and there is none.
Glossary entry →5. The contractor incurs costs to protect the works from a forecast flood. On what condition are they covered?
As emergency measures only, and only if the imminence of the damage can be dated
The dating condition is what separates an emergency measure from good site practice, and it is more demanding than it looks: you must be able to say from when the damage was imminent, with a document, a bulletin, an alert or an instruction. The answer covering them always assumes an economic reasoning the contract does not make; the one quantifying them at the damage avoided invents a figure no expert can establish. And the answer refusing them on principle turns the absence of damage into a general bar, when that is exactly the case emergency measures address.
Glossary entry →