May
Just over a year ago my wife and I decided we wanted to move to Canada. We were sick of the UK and we wanted to emigrate. One of the most expensive parts of moving overseas is the cost of international shipping and removals.
The company we finally chose was Burke Bros., based in Wolverhampton, UK, and this site is all about how it went badly wrong and ended up with lost boxes, personal possessions lost and damaged, and thousands of dollars worth of uninsured damage, including irreplaceable and treasured personal items.
We are still battling to get this sorted out. If you are looking for a moving company, or planning on using an overseas removal company then you NEED to read this site and learn from my experience. It could save you a LOT of heartache and save you a fortune in the process.
The story is still ongoing, so bookmark this site now or subscribe to the RSS feed to keep up to date with the latest developments.
Jul
Well, here we are, months later and we are STILL no closer to getting our problems resolved!
Chris Burke at Burke Bros assured me that the insurance company that were dealing with the loss and damage to the items that we insured would also be dealing with the loss and damage to the items that we did not insure.
Here is the relevant line from his email sent on 4th June 2009…
Furthermore, in respect of any items you failed to insure, insurers will still give this consideration under our common legal liability conditions.
And by the way Chris Burke, I didn’t “fail” to insure the other items, we chose to insure only certain high value items as we believed we were moving with a reputable and trustworthy company that would treat our possessions with respect and care. Our only mistake was trusting Burke Bros.
If you have read the other posts on this site then you will know that I had been hammering away at Chris Burke in an attempt to get him to answer the very simple question of what Burke Bros intended to do about the uninsured losses and damages that we had suffered as a result of their negligence. And after weeks of asking, and weeks of him ignoring me, that was his answer. It would all be dealt with by the insurance company coming to look at the items that were covered by insurance. Somehow that didn’t seem quite right to me. I mean an insurance company is in the business of paying out for items that are insured – not ones that aren’t insured!
Well, guess what? After all those weeks of asking Chris Burke about this, and finally getting an answer out of him, it appears that he lied! Ok, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that maybe he just didn’t know what he was talking about, because as I suspected, the insurance company only want to know about the items that were insured – and not the uninsured ones.
So, I’m back at square one.
The insurance company don’t want to know about the items that were lost and damaged unless they were covered under their policy. And the Burke Bros contract stipulates that Burke Bros are liable for ANY loss or damage resulting from their negligence – yet they won’t talk to me or give me any information about how I go about claiming!
I’ve got more about this in tomorrows post. At the moment we are seriously out of pocket and there appears to be no end in sight. The fight goes on.
The figure that you can see amid the mess that Burke Bros created when they threw things into this box is Major Matt Mason. He was bought for me about 40 years ago by an aunt who brought it back from the Bahamas. Obviously, I had played with him quite a bit when I was younger, but he was in good condition and in full working order.
Not anymore!
Thanks to the Burke Bros and their negligence he is now badly scraped and has a broken arm. I kept him 40 years because he meant something to me. Now he is ruined. This is a prime example of the sort of thing that I have been complaining about Burke Bros. It’s an item that is irreplaceable, has high sentimental value, but possibly has very little financial value. I would have looked mad had I tried to itemise every single item like this and how long would it have taken me to try and establish just what the market value of things like this are?
So, in the end I only insured the high value items, believing that my possessions would be safe and that I was in the hands of a reputable and trustworthy company. Lets just say I have revised my opinion!
Here’s a close up of the broken arm Burke Bros gave Major Matt Mason…
In the photo you can see a glass football souvenir bought for me by my parents, and it’s pretty fragile. It was not wrapped by Burke Bros, or packed in a way that would keep it safe, it was simply thrown in with a whole load of other things that they just dumped into a box.
A lot of things that were in that box were old and had a lot of sentimental value. But Burke Bros didn’t care.
I still don’t understand how this survived intact when so many other items in that box were trashed as a result of Burke Bros negligence.
- RT @chris_oconnor Why Choosing The Wrong Moving Company Cost Us Dearly – And How You Can Avoid It Ha… http://bit.ly/4Iruf (via @tweetmeme) #
- Chris Burke at Burke Bros still hasn’t got back to me on how to claim for the uninsured lost and damaged items, so have emailed Gary Burke #
With the man coming to look at the possessions that were damaged as a result of Burke Bros negligent packing I figured this would be a good time to start looking at some of the things that were damaged. It’s going to be a quick look today as I’m working on something else and have to go out tonight as well, so time is short!
What you can see in the picture is the bottom part of a 5 drawer high storage unit. These things aren’t particularly expensive, but the still cost about $45-$60 to replace, and lets face it this would have still been intact if it had been packed properly. And besides, why should we pay when we already paid Burke Bros to do a professional packing job!
The whole unit (containing all my wife’s card making stuff, and quite heavy) was picked up and dumped into a cardboard box. Burke Bros never gave any consideration to the fact that the wheels on these things are not the strongest and would probably break when dropped in the cardboard box. And even if they didn’t break straight away it was inevitable that they were going to break by the time that box was moved around a few times.
This was typical of the ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude that was shown to our possessions by Burke Bros.
More tomorrow…