Cars Pile Up In Scrap Yards

Car Dealership Experiences Flood Of Customers

Reported By Regina Raccuglia


NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- After thousands of clunkers were cashed in across Tennessee, there's now beginning to be a different kind of backup.

From the standard lemon to a ride nicer than many on the road, Town and Country Ford was wiped out of close to 70 Cash for Clunkers trade-ins.

"It was nuts, and the flood of customers we had," said Angela Stewart of Town and Country Ford. "We finally had to stop dealer trading because we had nothing."

Stewart is still working through the paperwork for all the Cash for Clunkers deals. She said the demand for the used car lot went through the roof.

"Our general manager went to Florida to an auction to get us cars," she said.

As Town and Country's lots fill back up, Express Auto Salvage in LaVergne can't empty its lots fast enough. About 600 clunkers are piled up there, waiting to meet their doom.

"There's some vehicles that are nice and some that ain't so nice," said Larry Weeks of Towing Clunkers.

Several junk yards Channel 4 spoke with across middle Tennessee can't say enough about how Cash for Clunkers filled their pockets.

"(It) picked up the car industry a little bit. You know, it's gave us work, too," said Weeks.

But some said that of those who most needed this deal, most didn't make the cut.

"It didn't help people that don't have the credit or really need a vehicle. It didn't help the people that were in the need," said Stewart. "I guess it's to make things greener."

But Stewart and others said the guidelines the federal government placed on the program may not mean a greener middle Tennessee.

"The way Cash for Clunkers was set up, you could get 3,005 incentive for going one mile per gallon better on a vehicle, you know, on trucks," said Stewart.

NEWS SOURCE

Firefighters use junked cars to help save lives

Scrap yard donates junked cars so firefighters can tear them apart.

Fire chief says "no donation, no training."

Reporter: Mary Rinzel with Photographer Duane Wolter
Email Address: mary.rinzel@weau.com

It's no cash for clunkers, but there are junkers… and they're saving fire departments cash.

An area scrap yard is chipping in junked vehicles so firefighters can tear them apart. It's practice that could save lives.

"It's one of the more stressful things we do," Township Fire Chief Jack Running.

When someone is trapped in a car, firefighters have little time to get to them.

"The patient has what we term the golden hour. They’ve got 60 minutes from the time of the impact and crash until the time they receive surgical intervention at the hospital,” Running says.

Which is why Chief Running, who is also a training instructor at Chippewa Valley Technical College, says extrication training is so vital.

"You can talk and show video. You can explain; but until you actually handle the tools—that’s the best way to learn," Running says.

And in extrication training the most important tool might just be the car. The one used Wednesday night came from Alter Scrap Processing in Eau Claire. The scrap company donated 15 to 20 beaters this year.

"I just think it's the safety aspect. These firefighters want and need to be trained," says Alter Facility Manager Rodney Deaton.

Alter can still salvage the scrap regardless of if the car is torn apart or not. But, workers donate their time to drop them off and scrape them up after the firefighters are finished with them. Deaton says it's the least they can do.

"If I’m in a car and I have an accident, then I really want someone who's trained to help me get out of that car and save my life," Deaton says.

The firefighters want to get the most bang for their buck so they spend up to an hour tearing the car apart. Each is worth around $200. They practice breaking every window, tearing off every door and they'll eventually rip away the entire roof. So when those real calls come, the rescuers will already have a couple cars under their belts.

After all “practice makes perfect,” Running says.

Wednesday wrapped up an eight week class through CVTC. Ten cars were torn apart in the process. The goal at a crash scene is to have the extrication complete in 10 to 15 minutes.


NEWS SOURCE

North Haven business shreds clunkers into scrap metal

One of the main goals of the federal clunkers program is to get gas guzzlers off the road forever, so the program requires them to be permanently disabled, a task handled by auto dealers. But that's just the beginning of the end and, really, the rebirth of the Ford Explorers, Jeep Cherokees and Dodge Caravans that consumers have been trading in for new Ford Focuses, Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas.

Steel is a recyclable commodity, and most of those old cars will eventually return as something else another automobile, perhaps, or a beam in a Shanghai skyscraper or a washing machine in a home in West Hartford. First the clunkers must again become raw steel.

The recycling process typically begins with a wrecker, who buys the disabled car from the auto dealer that made the cash-for-clunker deal. The wrecker typically salvages reusable parts and crushes the frame, then sells it to a scrap yard like the one Sims operates off I-91, near Exit 9.

Mr John Sartori GM of Sims Metal Management's North Haven scrap recycling facility said that "The shredder is a very destructive animal."

"They used to call them 'fragmentizers,'" said Sartori, who has worked at the North Haven scrap yard since 1976. "Now they call them shredders."

Sims operates a 9,000 horsepower shredder in Jersey City that is nearly twice as powerful as the North Haven shredder. It measures productivity by total tonnage processed, not by type of item, and it could not say how many cars that North Haven processes in a day or year. Also, Sims usually can't distinguish between cars junked through the Cash for Clunkers program and cars junked for other reasons.

Worldwide, Sims handled more than 16 million tonnes of material in its 2008 fiscal year, including washing machines, cast iron radiators, bicycles, and refrigerators, as well as automobiles and non metals. Sartori estimated that automobiles yield more than 40% of the material recycled at the North Haven plant.

Although the Cash for Clunkers program appears to be successful by several measures, more than 330,000 cars have been traded in so far, most of them haven't made it as far as the scrap yards yet. Many dealers are waiting for reimbursement from the federal government before disposing of the clunkers.

From the Sims shredder yard, much of the scrap these days goes to Gateway Terminal, a cargo handler on the New Haven waterfront. There the metal is loaded into ships bound for China, Turkey, Greece, Egypt and other places overseas. Sims' North Haven yard even has its own rail tracks and rail cars.

(Sourced from Hartford Courant)


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