What to Do in the First Seventy Two Hours After a Collision

Safety and any medical need come first and nothing below competes with that. Once people are accounted for, the vehicle becomes an evidence object and it will never again be in the exact state it is in right now. Photograph the whole scene before anything is repositioned. Wide shots that establish where the vehicles sat relative to lane markings, signage and each other are worth more later than close ups of the damage, because damage can be rephotographed at the shop and geometry cannot.

Then work inward. Photograph each vehicle from all four corners, then each damaged area, then anything specific: a bent slide rail, a separated seam, a cracked cap, debris on the ground, fluid trails, skid marks. Photograph the other driver's license plate, insurance card and driver license if they are offered. Note the time and the weather. Modern phone cameras record location and timestamp in the image data, which quietly turns an ordinary photograph into a dated record. Leave those images on the original device rather than forwarding compressed copies.

For a recreational vehicle, add the interior. Open the door and photograph the living space before anything gets tidied, because contents that shifted during impact indicate forces the exterior may not show. Photograph the slide positions, the roof if it can be seen safely from a distance, and the compartment interiors. If propane is involved, close the valve. If a lithium bank has taken an impact, treat it as a hazard and tell the tow operator so, since damaged cells are handled differently from a conventional battery.

Report the loss to your own carrier the same day even if the other driver was clearly at fault and even if you intend to pursue their carrier. Reporting opens your file, produces your claim number and starts your own coverages, including any rental or towing benefit you carry. It does not commit you to filing under your own collision coverage. What it does is create a dated record on your side, which matters if the other carrier later disputes liability or simply moves slowly.

Write the claim number down somewhere permanent and use it in the subject line of every message that follows. Ask for the adjuster's name, direct line and email address, and ask specifically whether a field inspection is planned or whether the carrier intends to work from photographs. That single question tells you which version of the process you are in, and it lets you plan for a teardown conversation early rather than discovering the photo estimate limitation three weeks later.

The tow destination is the most consequential decision of the first day. A vehicle towed to a yard chosen by whoever arrived first will accrue storage charges at that yard's rate, and moving it later means paying those charges plus a second tow. If the vehicle is drivable and safe, drive it. If it is not, direct the tow to the shop that will actually perform the repair. Our facility takes deliveries directly, and one tow to the right place is cheaper than two tows and a storage bill.

California owners select their own repair facility. Carriers maintain networks of shops they have negotiated rates and procedures with, and an adjuster recommending one of those shops is doing something ordinary rather than something improper. The recommendation is not an instruction. If you are told the claim will only be handled at a particular facility, the useful response is to ask for that statement in writing and to keep it with the rest of the file. Written statements tend to be more carefully worded than spoken ones.

For recreational vehicles the practical constraint is capability rather than policy. A great many collision shops are excellent with unibody passenger cars and have never laminated a sidewall, resealed a roof membrane, squared a slide opening or programmed a coach electrical system. Ask any candidate shop directly what they do with a delaminated panel, how they measure a slide opening and whether they perform their own fiberglass work or subcontract it. The answers separate shops quickly. A shop that hesitates on all three questions is telling you something useful.

Physical capacity matters too. A forty five foot diesel pusher needs a bay tall enough, long enough and rated to take it, plus a paint booth that can accept it. Our Yorba Linda facility runs thirty five thousand square feet built around exactly that constraint, and the drive from Eastvale is roughly twenty miles by SR-71 to SR-91, typically twenty five to thirty five minutes. All work is performed in shop. Mobile service is not offered here, and structural coach repair is not something that happens in a driveway.

Some evidence degrades within days. Fresh paint transfer wipes off. Fluid trails dry and disperse. Witnesses who gave a phone number stop answering. Bruising and stiffness that were absent at the scene appear on day two and get harder to connect to the event the longer they go unrecorded. Anything that will be different next week should be photographed, written down or reported this week, and that includes things that seem too minor to bother with at the time. Minor is a judgment better made later, with the record already in hand.

Water is the specific hazard for recreational vehicles. A collision that opens a seam, cracks a cap, lifts a section of roof membrane or breaks a window admits water at the next rain, and water damage that occurs after the loss because the opening went unprotected is an argument nobody wants to have. Cover openings, document that you covered them with dated photographs, and get the vehicle indoors or under cover if that is possible. Protective measures taken promptly are ordinary mitigation and they read well in a file.

Start an expense record on day two and keep it obsessively. Tow invoices, storage receipts, lodging if the coach was your accommodation, replacement transportation, tarps and covers, meals if you were displaced from a rig you live in. Photograph every receipt as it is issued rather than gathering them at the end. Reimbursement decisions belong to the carrier, but no carrier reimburses an expense nobody documented, and a running list assembled in real time is far more complete than one reconstructed in week six.

Several clocks start on day one without anyone announcing them. Storage accrues daily wherever the vehicle sits. Rental or loss of use benefits, where the policy carries them, are usually limited both by a daily figure and by a total number of days, and those limits are written for a passenger car repair rather than for a structural coach rebuild measured in weeks. Knowing both numbers in week one changes how an owner plans, and the declarations page is where they live.

Full time occupants face the sharpest version of this. When the damaged vehicle is also the residence, a repair that runs four to ten weeks is a housing problem rather than a transportation problem, and the coverage that applies varies enormously between policies. The productive move is to ask the adjuster in writing, early, exactly what lodging or displacement benefit the policy carries and what documentation is required to claim it. Ask before the expenses accumulate, not after. A written answer early is worth considerably more than a sympathetic conversation late.

Commercial operators should run the same exercise against downtime. A box truck or food unit out of service is lost revenue, and whether any of that is recoverable depends entirely on the policy and on the liability picture. What is universally true is that recovery of anything requires records: the unit number, the dates out of service, the work it would have performed and the substitute arrangement made instead. We supply the repair side of that record, dated and itemized, as a matter of routine on fleet files.