As many as 500,000 vehicles were flooded after hurricanes Katrina and Rita ripped through the Gulf States. Consumer groups are warning people that some of those cars will be cleaned up and sold to unsuspecting buyers.
You do not want a car that's been soaking in water. When the electrical system gets flooded, wiring slowly corrodes. A car may run fine at first, but pretty soon the "check engine" light is going to come on, and thousands of dollars in repairs later, there's still no assurance the car will ever run properly.
Sonny Reeves does want a flooded car. In fact, he'd like quite a few of them. He's an automotive-service technology instructor at Hutchings High School in Macon, Ga.
His students -- and aspiring mechanics all over the country -- need more late-model cars for practice. "Automotive programs are very expensive for school systems to operate and there are no funds for buying these vehicles," says Reeves.
"We get a few cars from some of the insurance companies. We have one car from GEICO. We have a couple of older cars from Ford and GM, [but] they have been taken apart so many times that they are of dubious training value."
Insurance and car companies are afraid to donate junk cars to high school and community college programs because of liability concerns, says Dan Perrin of the North American Council of Automotive Teachers (NACAT).
Perrin says Ford wanted to donate 10 flooded vehicles to NACAT and its members, but the company required a $1,000,000 insurance policy to protect it from liability. Perrin had to decline the donation because there's no money to pay for that kind of insurance.
Even if NACAT and the schools did have the money, they'd still have to worry about contamination of cars coming out the flooded areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
So, as cities like New Orleans deal with the burden of disposing of thousands of flooded cars, Sonny Reeves can only wish some were on their way to his high school.
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