A small splash of molten aluminum started a fire that ran past $100 million. ACE American read one endorsement to cap the molten-metal exposure at $10 million. A jury awarded JW Aluminum $112.3 million, the full $80 million sub-limit included. Now the insurers have appealed to the Fourth Circuit.
In 2020, on a production line in Goose Creek, South Carolina, a small splash of molten aluminum hit the floor and started a fire that nearly took the whole plant. No worker was hurt. No first responder was hurt. The damage ran past a hundred million dollars anyway, tens of millions in wrecked equipment and hundreds of millions in lost profits, all from a splash that small.
JW Aluminum Company had bought coverage for exactly this. An all-risk property program with a business-interruption layer, the kind a sophisticated insured carries so one bad shift never turns into an existential one. When the loss landed, the company turned to its insurers, led by ACE American Insurance Company, the Chubb unit on the paper, and asked them to pay what the policy promised. The story is laid out in The Texas Lawbook.
The insurers read the policy back differently.
They pointed to one endorsement. The language reached coverage for "direct physical loss or harm caused by heat from molten material," and on the carrier reading, that endorsement carved the molten-metal exposure down from $250 million to a $10 million sub-limit. So coverage the company believed ran into nine figures for a molten-aluminum event was, on the insurer math, capped near ten. One paragraph did the cutting. A fire that started with a small splash met a sentence built to shrink it.
That is the move worth naming. Not the fire. The endorsement. A loss this size lives or dies on which numbers a court lets the policy mean, and the insurers were asking the court and the jury to read the big number out and the small number in. The plant burned once. The coverage was being asked to burn twice.
JW Aluminum did not take the haircut. It sued. Reid Collins and Tsai, led by William T. Reid IV, took the policy-language fight into the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina, case number 2:21-cv-01034. The carriers had already won summary judgment once. The Fourth Circuit reversed it and sent the dispute back for trial, which is the only reason a jury ever saw the endorsement at all.
Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.
At trial the question was plain. Does one endorsement get to erase eight figures of business-interruption recovery, or does the insured collect the sub-limit it paid for? The jury sat with the policy. It sat with the splash. It sat with the months of stopped production that followed. Then it answered.
The carriers' cap argument did not survive the litigation. A court ruled the molten-material endorsement did not cap the claimed loss, and on November 19, 2025, the jury returned a unanimous verdict for JW Aluminum of $112.3 million. The breakdown is the whole point. $32.3 million for repair and replacement. And the full $80 million business-interruption sub-limit, awarded in full, the exact number the insurers had tried to read down to ten. The endorsement that was supposed to hold the loss near $10 million did not survive the court's reading of the policy or the jury's award. And the verdict figure sits before roughly five years of pre-judgment interest, which only widens the gap between what the carriers offered and what the policy cost them.
William Reid, whose younger lawyers tried much of the case, told The Texas Lawbook the moment was "pretty dramatic." For an insured staring at a sub-limit fight, the drama was the math. Eighty million dollars turned on a reading the carriers lost.
The endorsement that nearly cut JW Aluminum's recovery by seventy million dollars had been sitting in the program the whole time, quiet, until a covered event made it load-bearing. Most coverage towers carry one like it. A sub-limit endorsement reads like boilerplate on the day a company binds it and reads like a trap on the day that company files. JW Aluminum found its trap only after the fire, in a courtroom, in front of a jury. The cheaper version of that fight is the one fought over the policy language before anything burns at all.
The fight is not over. On May 19, 2026, the insurers docketed their appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, No. 26-1619. The same court that once revived this case by reversing summary judgment now holds the question of whether the full $80 million sub-limit can stand over a buried endorsement built to shrink it. The briefing schedule is not yet public. The docket is open and live as of today.
So the splash is settled and the number is not. The litigation said the endorsement does not cap the loss at ten, the court in its reading of the policy and the jury in its full-sub-limit award. Now a higher court gets to say if that no still holds. The plant stands. The fight does not.
The Executive Briefing is six questions. It shows you exactly where the gaps are.
Take the Executive Briefing →Trial drama, nuclear verdicts, and the plaintiff-firm tactics behind them. Court-reporter prose, no consultant filler. Read by litigation leaders at F500 legal departments and national carriers. Free.