Your old photos are not the gotcha the insurance company wants them to be

Being rear-ended while you're already pulled over on the shoulder with your hazard lights on is about as clear-cut as a crash gets.

And yet the fight still turns ugly fast.

In St. Albans, that usually means a wreck on I-89, Route 7, or one of those rough spring stretches where frost heaves and mud season have chewed up the pavement. You pull over because something feels off, or traffic is backing up near Exit 19, and some driver plows into the shoulder anyway.

Then you find out that driver has either no insurance, or the bare Vermont minimum.

Now your own insurance company is involved through uninsured/underinsured motorist coverage. And suddenly they're combing through your old Facebook and Instagram posts like they're auditioning for detective work.

A photo of you carrying conduit last summer.

A hiking picture from Smugglers' Notch.

A video from two years ago where you're up on a ladder laughing about a panel swap.

That does not prove you're fine now. It proves you had a life before the crash.

Why your own insurer starts acting like the other side

This is the part people hate.

You pay for UM/UIM coverage so that if the driver who hit you has no coverage or a junk policy, your own carrier steps in. In theory, that's protection.

In reality, once money is on the table, your insurer has every reason to minimize the injury claim.

If the other driver carried only $25,000 in bodily injury coverage - which is still common in Vermont - that number can disappear instantly once an ambulance ride, imaging, missed work, and follow-up care show up. An electrician who can't lift, climb, crawl, or twist normally is not dealing with a minor inconvenience. That's wages, job capacity, and physical pain all tied together.

So the carrier starts looking for anything that helps them say your injury is exaggerated, old, or unrelated.

Old social media photos are cheap ammo.

What those photos actually mean in a Vermont injury claim

Here's what most people don't realize: the date on the photo matters more than the activity in it.

If the picture is from before the crash, it usually shows your baseline. That can actually help if your claim is being handled honestly. It shows what you were physically able to do before getting rear-ended on the shoulder.

If the picture is after the crash, then context matters.

Were you forcing yourself through one afternoon because you needed to work?

Did somebody snap one smiling photo during a ten-minute break, while the rest of the day you were stiff, medicated, or hurting?

Did you try a hike and pay for it for three days afterward?

Insurance adjusters love pretending a single image tells the whole story. It doesn't give a damn about pain flare-ups, sleep loss, numbness down the arm, or the fact that electrical work is repetitive and brutal on a neck, shoulder, and low back.

A still photo is not a medical opinion.

The shoulder crash helps you on fault, but not automatically on value

If you were legally stopped on the shoulder with hazard lights on, fault is usually not the hard part.

The hard part is value.

The adjuster may quietly accept that their driver caused the wreck, then turn around and say your injuries "don't line up" with the property damage, or your social media suggests "ongoing normal activity."

That's the real game.

So you need your timeline clean:

• the date and location of the crash
• photos showing where your vehicle was stopped and hazards if available
• the police report from the St. Albans area response
• medical records starting right after the crash
• work restrictions, missed days, and what electrical tasks you could no longer do
• the dates of every social media post they're waving around

That last one matters because insurers constantly blur timing. A pre-crash photo gets described like it was taken last week. A post-crash image gets stripped of context.

UM/UIM claims can go beyond the other driver's tiny policy

If the driver who hit you was uninsured, your UM coverage is the first place the injury claim usually lands.

If the driver had insurance but not enough, you may exhaust that liability policy and then make a UIM claim under your own auto policy.

And yes, this can include a hit-and-run if you never got a plate number, as long as the facts support that an unidentified driver caused the crash. Shoulder collisions sometimes turn into exactly that kind of mess when the striking vehicle bolts or gives fake information.

The stacking question is where Vermont claims get interesting.

Some households have multiple vehicles insured, sometimes under one policy, sometimes more than one. Some people also have access to coverage through a spouse living in the same home. Depending on the policy language, the number of vehicles, and how the coverage was written, there may be more than one UM/UIM layer to look at.

This is where electricians and other tradespeople get burned. They assume the at-fault driver's tiny policy is the ceiling. It may not be.

Your declarations pages matter. Every vehicle. Every policy in the house. Any umbrella coverage too.

Don't "clean up" your social media now

Deleting posts after a crash can look shady as hell, even when the photos were harmless.

Better move: stop posting, save what already exists, and look at dates carefully.

If an old hunting, hiking, softball, or work photo is being used against you, the answer is usually not panic. The answer is chronology. Was it before the wreck? Was it after? What happened physically afterward? What restrictions did your doctor note? What jobs in Franklin County did you have to turn down because you couldn't handle ladders, overhead work, or long drives?

That's the story that matters.

Vermont gives you three years from the date of the crash to file a personal injury lawsuit, but insurance claims get shaped way before that. The first bad narrative can stick if nobody corrects it. And once an adjuster decides your old Facebook pictures are more believable than your medical records and work limits, you're already in the fight whether you wanted one or not.