2 min read
What insurers want after a site incident
A fire, flood or theft on site is stressful enough without discovering your insurer wants evidence you never thought to keep. Here's what they ask for, and why most contractors can't produce it.
When something goes wrong on site, a fire, a flood, theft of tools or materials, storm damage, the insurance claim that follows is where a lot of contractors discover, too late, what they should have been keeping all along. Insurers don't just want a description of what happened. They want evidence: what materials and plant were on site at the time, what the site looked like before and after, and often a record of who was present and what state the works were in.
This catches people out because none of it feels urgent in the moment. Nobody photographs a stack of materials in a site container thinking they'll need to prove its value after a break in. Nobody keeps a running log of plant on site because it seems like unnecessary admin, right up until a claim depends on it. Insurers are not being unreasonable when they ask for this. They're protecting against fraudulent and inflated claims, and a contractor with no record looks, from their side of the desk, indistinguishable from one making things up.
The claims that get paid quickly and in full are the ones where the contractor can produce a clear, dated trail: photos of the site and materials from the days before the incident, a diary entry noting what was on site, and ideally photos taken immediately after showing the damage before anything was moved or cleared. The claims that drag on for months, or get settled for far less than the actual loss, are the ones built on memory and estimation.
This applies beyond the obvious disasters too. A subcontractor injury, a member of the public tripping on site, a vehicle reversing into scaffolding, all of these can turn into liability claims where the insurer and potentially the other party's solicitor want to know exactly what conditions were like on site that day. RAMS documents, who signed them, and whether the site matched what was assessed all become relevant fast.
Keeping this kind of record doesn't need to be a separate system bolted on for insurance purposes. If your day to day site diary and photo record are already thorough, because you're using them to manage the job, they double as exactly the evidence an insurer needs when something goes wrong. That overlap is deliberate in how we built Sitestack. The record you keep to run the job is the same record that protects you when things don't go to plan.