Torrential rains last week caused record-shattering floods in some areas of our state. Here is but one casualty I caught after the water had receded. While I was taking this picture, an employee of the city stopped to speak with me. He said the floodwater had claimed their street sweeper along with seven dump trucks, all of them swept away from the parking area behind the spot where I took this picture.
Time does not grant any CC, regardless of age, immunity from unfortunate events. Have you witnessed the death of a CC due to some sort of disaster or calamity? If so, please share.
Perhaps with having minimal electrical components and interior upholstery the Ford pickup could somehow be saved. I bet the owner wishes someone had bought it before the flood.
I was thinking the same thing, these are tough and basic enough that it could be dried off and still live.
It should live without a lot of difficulty; the water had only fallen by around 4″ at this point. I’m thinking that would not be enough to get to the intake and everything else could drip-dry.
I’ve driven my old F-100 through deeper puddles 😉
Although not so much anymore, since the holes in the floor are getting too big. Of course, that does allow the water to drain out again quickly!
Yeah, heck, our old driveway had bigger puddles than that!
My dad once took his ’62 Chrysler swimming, nose first, off the end of a boat ramp. (Don’t ask.) He had it towed to a garage and had all the fluids changed. It was fine. If the owners of that pickup were able to get to it in reasonable time and do likewise, it may be OK.
I don’t know if an Iacocca-era 5th Avenue counts as a classic, but a neighbor had a large, rotten tree limb fall on his car. After it was cut up, it had to be a half-ton of wood. The only thing that saved his life was stopping to smoke a cigarette on the porch before leaving for work.
It happened about 6am. I heard it happen and thought it was a car accident. I cursed careless drivers and went back to sleep.
I’ve never seen one in person, but I did read a local police report many years back where a 1955 Packard convertible (Caribbean?) was broadsided and totaled. It was a fine spring weekend day, and some idiot made a left turn into the side of the Packard coming from the opposing direction. If I remember correctly, the Packard driver was not seriously injured, but the car was listed as a $20,000 writeoff.
I was just about to say the same thing – mere water hardly defines death in cars of a certain vintage. This contrasts the complexity of the modern automobile. However, let me be the first to praise the ability of the computer cars to tell me where to start when said systems need repair, and their facility to give me 300 h.p. while delivering 25 highway m.p.g. This all reminds me of a bargain once made by a lone man at the crossing of two rural roads.
The attrition rate continues with the old cars, it just slows down a lot. I used to know a fellow who kept quite a few old cars in a pole barn, including a couple of Packards. One day after a big snow, the roof caved in all over the cars, several of which were damaged at least moderately.
I did a brief posting about a year ago from when I realized that the cause of a traffic jam was that a guy in a 49 Ford had rear ended the car ahead of him. The Ford looked fixable, so it was at least not completely destroyed.
Unfortunately, accidents, floods, tornados and garage fires will continue to take their toll, picking off an occasional old car here or there.
Yep, that truck is easily savable. A modern thingy with tons of black boxes, not so much.
my father spent 3 years restoring a1948 armstrong siddley star saphire saloon in the late 70she had only just had the car mot when he was rear ended by a bustle back caddilac on the kings road london completely totaling his car he wasnt pleased ..a couple of years later he crashed his 1963 daf 33 daffodile into a parked mg td totaling the mg but the daf lived to fight another day,lol
I once saw a mint ’68 or ’69 Chevelle SS396 plow right into the back of a city bus at about 40mph. The whole front end of the Chevy was crushed, but the driver must have been okay as he was looking mighty pissed standing off to the side of the road talking to the cops.
I also nearly killed one myself one time. I was driving the back roads to the local drugstore a few miles from my house after about a week of nonstop rain in my ’72 Buick Skylark coupe (my first car). The roads all had large drainage ditches off to the side, but because of the rain which covered everything in about a foot of water, you couldn’t tell where the road ended–it looked like one giant swamp. Of course I drove my car right off the road and went nose first into the ditch, flooding my car up to the dashboard with rain water. Luckly, a guy in a pickup took mercy on me and towed me out of the ditch and I drove it home with water sloshing around and the pedals still under water. Thankfully, all it took to get it right was a bucket, a shopvac, some old beach towels, and a box fan. Moral: If you can’t see the road, don’t try to drive on it. Lesson learned.
Might be considered a pseudo-classic today; at the time I considered it a piece of shit. The car? 1982 Camaro Sport Coupe. 2.8L V-6, four speed stick. Spring, 1983. Car is one month out of the body shop (after girlfriend at the time yanked on the emergency brake on an icy bridge at Lynnhaven Inlet, Virginia Beach the previous February during a winter cold snap.
Heavy spring rain somewhere where Va. Beach meets Norfolk. I think I should turnback; same girlfriend (who pulled brake) and her well endowed best friend suggest “you can make it.” Intersection up ahead that is flooded.
Well, I sorta make it. First gear, crawling along – water is up to the door sills, but none coming in. Suddenly, car stalls (tailpipe under water; back pressure). We get out and open the doors and start pushing. Water up to door sills, still nothing coming in. We’re across this large boulevard intersection that is flooded when, lo and behold – coming from the opposite direction, but a tow truck.
The wake floods the interior. Good news: Water up to the edge of the seats; car ran – scooped out with 7-11 cups most of the water. Next day was warm and opened doors, window, hatch and believe it or not, it dried out pretty good. No electrical damage. Car did have a little of a musty smell (guaranteed water go under the carpet).
Said car was a POS with numerous things breaking under warranty, was slow, and I traded it that October for a Dodge truck. If the Camaro had been pawned off on someone else, and not kept braking, guaranteed that floorboard would’ve been rusting through in about five years time (I’ll betcha it would up in Western New York or Ohio where there are numerous “clean, Southern Cars!” sold).
That car was such a pile of trash, I should’ve pushed it into the Chesapeake Bay!
Judging from the slight stain mark on the building, it appears the water was only about 6 inches higher before receeding. The water may have ruined the door cards (if any), but it may not have even gotten up to the padding level in the seats. A good drying out, and drain of the gas tank if vented is probably all that is needed.
I owned a near dead classic(it was a 2nd hand car and not a classic then).I braided a girl’s hair like Bo Derek and she gave me a Mk3 Cortina that had been flooded during a high tide as payment.I got the car running but it smelled awful and I sold it to my brother’s mate who needed the glass.His bunny boiler ex had smashed all the windows.
How about the upcoming Lambrecht Chevrolet auction? That has to be classified as the automotive equivalent of mass murder or genocide. Those cars have been slowly rotting away and how many of them are just going to be dragged home by some money pants schmuck who got in over his head only to be sold off as parts or as scrap to the nearest salvage yard?
I think the serious monied bidders will buy the Lambrecht cars for what they are; cosmetic restoration, go through the brake lines, cylinders, drain/clean fuel tanks, float bowls, flush any fluids and have these time capsules looking and running again like the rolled off the line . . . because so many of them “just” did!!
Sadly, some of the “outside” cars may meet a fate of some idiot . . . let’s hope and pray not.
I was looking at some of those cars, most of them are cars that aren’t even that desirable in good condition.
Most flooded classics are fixable with enough time and money, but bush fires through Victoria a few years ago that killed so many people put paid to a few classics as well. Not much will survive that sort of intense heat…
I saw a photo of a Datsun 1600 (510) with the camshaft left sitting on top of the engine block, everything else was gone, I’m not sure if there was even much of an aluminium puddle left under the car.
Yea, I helped kill two and I still regret it though one more than the other. Back in 2009 I sold my 87 Caprice Estate to a demolition derby for a few hundred dollars.Here is my feeble attempt to justify what I did since it was either the demolition derby or a scrap yard, no one in New York wanted an old gas guzzling wagon. My folks and I even thought of Cash for Clunkering it, but 09 Outbacks are kind of ugly as well as kind of expensive. Also, my folks have first model year fears and you could not buy a used vehicle with you C4C Credit. So, anyway even though it was a Long Island car my Caprice still had some decently series rust holes and no sheet metal in the driver side footwell. In fact I nearly impaled my foot on a stick that poked through the carpet while soft roading it around Tompkins County. It also had a “funny” issue where it would lose power, shudder, and the check engine light would come almost all at once. Stomping the accelerator a few times usually fixed the problem. The Caprice usually smelled like gas (did not really care why that was) and it had several other issues that I would throw money at which is why my friends nicknamed it Patty Hearst.
The second Curbside Classic I killed is the one I really regret. Having driven too far the day before and not getting enough sleep I apparently ran a red light in the Los Angeles Metro Area clipping the corner of a 1st gen Nissan Murano (nothing special) totaling Sandy the Voyager. If the plastic radiator filler neck had been on the other side it would not have been pushed into the battery and broken; that was the only reason why Sandy became immobilized. However, looking back I realize that the 03 Caravan I have now is a better vehicle and totaling the Plymouth enabled me to get out of a love that was endlessly nickle and diming my family. Plus, the Voyager had terminal tin worm that could not be fixed on a limited budget. Do not get me wrong through, I am still sorry for the events that happened, but I am grateful that no one was hurt and the events were not as bad as they could have been.
The Demolition Derbies around here kill countless classics as does the relentless use of Road Salt since the local DOT can get it from Cargil in plentiful amounts. Sometimes the Road Salt is an inch thick at least and you can chisel it off the roads on a dry warm day in the Winter.
Dido on the demolition derbies.
There’s a house about a mile away from me that strips old cars and turns them into demolition derby cars. The owner even has a special garage for it. It angers me every time I drive by. Over the past two years I’ve seen many Classics meet their demise at the sake of this guy. Several Cadillacs, Colonnades, a Chevelle, Town Car, Grand Marquis, even an ’80s Maxima and Camry, just awful massacres.
Well a Future Curbside Classic. Back around 1999 or so, I witnessed a wrecked yellow Plymouth Prowler. As traffic slowed down around the accident, we noticed that one of the passengers was a Chrysler salesman. It had been out on a test drive!
A few years ago a saw a 1958 buick that caught fire on the freeway just north of stockholm. The front looked perfect, nice crome and paint but the passenger compartment and the trunk was on fire. There were sevral pepole standing around it when I passed by. It was an intense fire and the fire trucks hadn’t arrived yet so I’m gessing that the front was eventually destroyed too.
Death of a CC? The stories I could tell. Back in the ’70s and ’80s I was into street racing and drag racing big time. I didn’t just witness the death, I wielded the knife, errr.. wrench. If it had 4 doors and a big engine, we stripped it for parts. 2 doors and a big engine and it had the daylights driven out of it. Then we stripped it for parts. I had a sideline business building V-8 Vegas that cost many a ’60s Chevy it’s 327, and I harvested a lot of 396s and 454s from otherwise salvageable full size “boats”. Demolition derbies? You don’t wanna know. They were just old cars then, but there are a few I wish we’d saved. Mea Culpa.
One of my friends from those days became a commercial pilot and amassed considerable wealth, which was spent on cars he couldn’t afford back then. He had a detached 4 car garage built to house his projects, and one day it burned down. A ’69 GS 400 Buick, a “64 Impala SS, a very rare ’72 Z-28 and a Porsche of some sort were lost.
I still have the engine from the Z-28. Old habits die hard.
I saw a very nice ’66 (somewhere about that old) Cadillac drive into a water filled underpass and disappear. It was during one of Las Vegas’ infamous fall floods. He managed to hydrolock the motor in it too. I always wondered if he was drunk as he was a native, and the water was almost all the way up to the level of the street before you got to the underpass, and visible to anyone with open eyes. He swallowed a lot of water and they took him to the hospital. The car was junked, and I saw it at SNAP a week later.
I saw the slow death of a 54 Wolsley, a guy at work used it for a daily driver in 2000.It was a rough looking car with so much filler that if he was in an accident he would get asbestosis.One day he pulled the engine out and it sat engineless for 2 years in the drive.He sold it another guy who did nothing with it for 2 more years before he bought it back for more than he sold it in worse condition.It remains rotting away as far as I know.Not my cup of tea when it comes to classic cars but a shame to see a classic rusting to death slowly
Didn’t see it myself, but some years ago Car and Driver published one of their “Ten Best” issues, which featured “Ten Best Accident Stories.”
The owner of a beautifully restored ’57 or ’58 Ford Sunliner told the story of how he was driving with the top down, when suddenly a semi came up from behind at high speed, and ran onto the rear deck of the car, the left front wheel of the semi ending up next to right shoulder of the driver, who miraculously escaped with serious injuries.
As I recall, his first words to the semi driver – who had fallen asleep at the wheel – were something to the effect of, “How in the hell could you miss seeing 19 feet of canary yellow sheet metal, trimmed out in God knows how many pounds of chrome?”
I remember reading about that accident. The pictures of that poor car after being run over by a semi rig are unforgettable. Of course, in any car-semi collision, the car does not come out well at all. That one reminds me of another I read about years ago in one of the old car mags in which a guy was towing one Squarebird with another. Somehow he lost control and rolled one or both of them.
Ha, I remember that one well. It about the June or July of ’96 issue. I was living abroad at the time but It stuck with me because it happened in Canada, right around Red Deer Alberta on Hwy 2. Trust me, it hasn’t gotten much better 15 odd years later. That strip from Edmonton to Calgary is hairy. Personal encounters aside, it’s heavily patrolled, but lots of crazy stuff still happens. My visits home have become more infrequent, so how do I know? This.
http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/ctid/5103
I am surprised that it happened, would have thought the driver of the Ford would have seen all that steel bearing down on him fast.
My aunt was run into/over by a truck while waiting to do a right-hand turn (think left-hand turn for you), the truck ended up just behind her seat.
Surprisingly, the car was not written off, but repaired although the trunk did not shut well afterwards. My aunt had pretty bad whiplash which still troubles her a bit.
On YouTube there’s two videos that are painful to watch for car guys. In one, there’s a rare, $500,000 Lamborghini Miura S burning itself to a crisp on a street in downtown London. Someone stated a fuel leak was the culprit.
In the second, it shows the aftermath of a mint Porsche 914 getting plowed by a drunk driver in an SUV. The car was completely demolished and the driver suffered life-threatening injuries.
I don’t know if a ’76 C10 GMC truck really counts considering the sheer number remaining in service, but we had one come in on trade for a brand new 2013 Sierra. It had been a daily driven farm truck from the day it was purchased until the day it drove onto that lot. It lives on, in sorts. I would figure a piece of it’s soul lives on in my ’78 GMC. It has it’s doors.
I wouldn’t say I witnessed it’s death, but I do see it every time I visit the wrecking yard. Every time, between the rust and parts picking, I see it wasting away one piece at a time. I’ll probably see it on the crush pile in the next month or so.
Nothing from the 1970s exists as a daily driver in New York and 1976 was more than 25 years ago so it is a classic. Too bad no one bought it or the owners had the common sense to not trade it in.
My dad had a Euro model 1966 Mercedes-Benz 280SE coupe with the factory sunroof. It originally belonged to his grandfather, who bought it new while on a business trip in Europe. After over 20 years of sitting in the condemned chicken coop in our backyard (in 2002), he decided to send it to a restoration shop. It was stolen from the shop (or by), we don’t know. That car was never recovered, but I imagine that it is probably two Hyundai Accents now.
Yes, every time I watched an episode of Monster Garage and occasionally overhaulin..
Back in the late ’70’s a buddy of mine parked his ’75 Peugeot 504 at low tide at the beach in Florida. Although the details are hazy, I am quite certain that beers were involved. Tide came in (as it is wont to do), and he got stuck. Local dude driving by in his jacked-up 4wd truck smelled a twenty (it was the 70s) and was sure he could pull him out; by the time he was finished proving he was wrong, the Atlantic Ocean was at the rocker panels and it was getting dark. I clearly remember Local Dude taking a running start with a jacking strap attached to the unfortunate Pug’s bumper, and seeing the body flex (and every seam in the car stretch), but not budge. By the time the huge semi tractor tow truck (as seen in a recent CC) showed up, the seawater was just shy of the fuse box on the underside of the dash. Once unstuck and out of the water, my buddy drove it home, pulled the carpets and drain plugs and hosed it out. When it was time to get a new car, he donated that one.
Same guy also told me how the town we grew up in restored one of their old (mid-Fifties) open-cockpit (LaFrance?) fire trucks in the mid-’80s for use as a parade vehicle. The room-temperature-IQ maintenance supervisor parked the newly-restored fire truck on a boat ramp to run the fire pumps, drawing suction from the lake. He neglected to chock the fire truck’s wheels; leaving it unattended, the shiny red truck slid into the lake with the fire pumps running.
Witnessed some restorable 60s Cadillacs and a 60s Jaguar S-Type getting crushed last summer, had to participate in the murder of some nice malaise stuff, some roached grey-market W126s and Series III XJ12s and some 80s turbo cars at the Official Curbside Classic Car Lot as part of my work (getting them ready for the crusher), friend of mine cuts up finned Mopars as yard art and parts donors, and I saw a nice stepnose Alfa GTV get smashed to death by a Hummer H2 fairly recently.