Physical damage trigger (contingent business interruption)

Contingent business interruption, described in its general form by the entry bearing that name, in principle responds to any failure of a third party the insured depends on. But its most common market version, a property damage extension that treats a supplier's site as though it belonged to the insured, remains bound by a trigger far narrower than the cover's name suggests. That derived construction imposes three cumulative conditions, each of which is in practice a distinct obstacle: physical damage, a peril appearing in the policy schedule, and a site either named or caught by a generic clause carrying a modest sub-limit. The product never promised anything else and its price reflects that limitation, but the implicit assumption underlying it has dated. It assumes production stops because something has been destroyed in an identifiable factory, an accurate description of twentieth-century industry. Yet the major disruptions of the past decade, strait closures, sanctions, export controls, sole-supplier insolvency, software failure spread by update, produce the same economic effect as a fire without sharing any of its legal characteristics, and all fail at the first condition.