After Hurricane Sandy, Insurance Auto Auctions Corp. found itself with an overload of damaged cars that needed dealing with. The company had to store them somewhere. So it’s renting out an airport on Long Island — a small one, to be fair — and filling the runway up with disabled vehicles. The New York Post reports:
Roughly 15,000 storm-ravaged vehicles are parked bumper-to-bumper on runways and taxiways at the Calverton Executive Airpark, which years ago was the site of a Grumman aircraft-manufacturing plant …
Some of the cars can’t be driven again and will end up being salvaged just for parts.
But the insurance companies that own the cars hope to sell most of them to new owners who could fix them up and put them back on the road. Most of the cars are fairly new.
The company must figure it can make some sort of profit on these wrecks: It’s spending $3,200 an acre to store them. These are just a fraction of the cars the storm damaged — the Post puts the total at “more than 200,000” just in the New York area.
