City Must Tow a Huge Line of Flooded Cars

As electricity gets slowly switched back on and drinkable water starts to flow again, the city is turning to another herculean labor -- the removal and scrapping of more than 200,000 waterlogged and abandoned cars.

The corroding cars are strewn about the city, on freeway medians, side roads and parking lots. They are stranded in front of homes and apartments, and in some areas, the middle of the street.

So far, the city has towed about 1,600 of them. At that rate, it would take about a decade to finish the job.

“This is junk car city,” said tow truck driver Joe Messina, unloading a blue and white church van with a “Jesus First” license plate last week. The burly and bearded man, who is employed by a city subcontractor called Car Crushers, has his work cut out for him.

“I would think this is unprecedented,” said Chuck Carr Brown, the state’s assistant secretary for environmental services with the Department of Environmental Quality. “We’ve all got a huge task ahead.”

The slow pace of removal hasn’t been for lack of effort, but of resources. Over the last month, the only break for drivers like Messina came courtesy of Hurricane Rita. Within that same period though, the city has had only 10 tow trucks -- six operated by the city, another four by a subcontractor -- tackling the task.

“Ten trucks isn’t going to get it done,” said John Shire, chief of the city’s public works department, who declined to estimate the length and cost of the massive project. “We haven’t even scratched the surface yet.”

It’s far from the only problem the city faces. Officials are still scrambling to restore the basics -- water, electricity and sanitation -- which are not available in all neighborhoods.

And the city’s attention has also been diverted by an even more colossal cleanup project: the estimated 50 million cubic yards of other debris, including fallen trees, mildewing furniture and appliances. The most optimistic estimates are that it will take a year to dispose of it all.

Still, officials realize the urgent need to haul away the vehicles that pockmark the city landscape.

Shire is hopeful that state and federal officials will provide additional funding to hire more tow truck subcontractors to speed up collection, and that the bureaucratic process that precedes junking the cars can be streamlined.

For now, the city’s abandoned vehicles are towed to one of four parking lots for temporary storage. Then vehicle identification numbers are recorded, state police catalog the pickup, and insurance companies are notified. Adjustors will inspect the vehicles, the vast majority of which are expected to be total losses, and then the cars will have to be towed again to a scrap yard in another part of the city.

In some cases, owners may be allowed to reclaim their vehicles and contents, but in many cases the contamination is so severe that even if owners want the car, they won’t be allowed to have it because of public health concerns.

If the city had unlimited space, this wouldn’t be a huge obstacle, but the city’s four storage lots are filling up fast, even with the relatively small number of cars in them.

“We’re not sure where else we can store the cars, so we have to speed things up,” Shire said. “We’ve got to start crushing them as soon as possible.”

Meanwhile, the city plods along with its tow trucks and continues to cram as many abandoned vehicles as it can into its limited space. One of its larger lots, outside a looted Winn-Dixie grocery store in the Treme District, holds hundreds of cars trucked in from the Superdome area.

The lot is jammed with a wide variety of vehicles -- BMWs, Ford Explorers, Honda Civics -- many discolored with water lines to door level, windows smashed, trunks popped open and dirty water pooled in cup holders.

The city’s top priority has been to clear major roadways of vehicles, followed by the business districts and repopulated areas. The city has yet, however, to venture into the worst-hit areas, where huge numbers of cars await retrieval.

In these parts of the city, such as the Lower 9th Ward and New Orleans East, the water rose as high as 12 feet, swallowing all cars in its path. At a Kia dealership in New Orleans East, dozens of brand-new, ruined vehicles remain on its now dry parking lot. Among them: a waterlogged Indigo Kia Sorento EX with the manufacturer’s sticker price of $25,360 still pasted to a window.

At nearby apartment complexes, more than a dozen directly off Interstate 10, row after row of once-submerged cars, now caked in mud, bake in the stifling heat and humidity.

The destruction of so many vehicles has led to a rush upon car dealers, who themselves are frantically trying to order new cars and reopen for business. Many dealers are trumpeting their vehicles as “high and dry,” which seems to have replaced “employee discount” as the way to attract customers.

Marshall Bros., a Lincoln Mercury dealership in Metairie, ran an ad in the local newspaper Oct. 1 promoting the “best selection of slightly damaged vehicles.”

“They have some wind damage,” said Rick Schoen, sales manager of the dealership, whose showroom took on 3 feet of water and has been reopened just a week.

“There’s some chipped paint, things like that. Two-hundred-miles-per-hour winds will do that.”

The defects can earn consumers $500 to $1,000 off the regular price, Schoen said. In addition, his dealership, like most in town, is offering a Hurricane Katrina rebate of $750 to buyers who can prove their vehicles were destroyed by the storm.

Schoen said he’d sold 30 cars in less than a week. The pre-hurricane pace was about 50 a month. His customers used to nearly always have a trade-in vehicle; last week there were only two.

Postal worker Troy Johnson bought a new white Ford pickup over the weekend in nearby Lafayette. He used it to return to his second-floor apartment building in New Orleans East and salvage what he could.

The 40-year-old was trapped in his apartment by rising waterfor three days before he paddled on an air mattress for half a mile to a bridge where a rescue helicopter pulled him to safety.

He walked over to his car, a once dark-green 1995 Corvette that he’d owned for two years. It was covered in mud, its windows gone, and an uprooted tree rested on its sunken hood.

“I don’t know when they are going to get all these cars out of here,” said Johnson, looking around the complex’s lot filled with destroyed vehicles like his. “But considering what I’ve been through, this is minor.”