Can Commercial Tenants Be "Trapped" in a Lease?

By Thomas Rose | Tue, 16 Dec 2008

What happens when a hurricane spins off a small tornado, which then tears off a commercial air-conditioning unit from the roof of a two-story office building, exposing every office in the building to torrential rains for hours, followed by no electrical power for weeks, destroying each office's contents with either water or mold. The legal issue: can the tenants of the office building immediately terminate their leases, or must they wait on the owner of the building to rebuild the building and remediate the mold?