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Recovering
auto metals from the Joplin tornado
Nobody expected nor wanted the death and destruction
created by the tornado that blasted through Joplin, Missouri
this spring, but, as always, life and business goes on. In this
major clean up effort there was and continues to be frenzied
activity to recover metals.
“There are tons of people out there with
pickup trucks, trailers, cars, vans – you name it – anything
they can haul stuff in. The city opened up the right-of-way all
around town, all of the easements. Any type of metal that is
out on the city-owned property, people are allowed to pick it
up and haul it in.” That’s how Jack Todd, owner of Acme Metals & Recycling
described the scene in Joplin six weeks after the May 22 tornado
passed through.
Based in Joplin, but luckily missed by the
tornado, Acme is primarily involved in industrial recycling of
all grades of ferrous and nonferrous scrap metal. Acme also provides
demolition, plant dismantling and container services to recover
metals. In cooperation with Commodity Resources of New England,
Inc., Acme recycles thousands of tons of scrap metal and waste
paper each year.
“When you take a third of the town right through the heart of
the residential area, the hospital and the retail district –
it looks like a giant grinder has taken everything down to the
ground. Everything was sandblasted from the small debris – trees,
cars, houses and the people too. That was actually the cause
of many fatalities, people losing their skin. You can literally
see six miles from one side of the town to the other – monstrous
destruction. There are hundreds of FEMA debris trucks working
everyday to clean it up, but it’s going to take a long time.
They are perhaps one-third done,” Todd reported.
Todd told us that his phone has not stopped
ringing for weeks, yet his business is not open to the public
since he does contract hauling and services industrial accounts.
“Everyone in the area is looking for dumpsters, prices for metals
and which metals can and cannot be recycled. I have to turn business
away because I’ve run out of containers. I had 40 30-yard dumpsters,
but very few extras. Everyone’s had to step up and change the
way they do business over the past few weeks.”
“There are constantly lines four and five
blocks long to get into scrap yards around here,” Todd continued.
“They are swamped. People from the scrap yards are out directing
traffic for those wanting to get into the yards, showing them
where to put ferrous and nonferrous metals. The piles of metals
at yards went from 50 to 60 tons, probably 50 feet wide and suddenly
grew to piles 200 to 300 yards long, 6 stories tall and 100 yards
wide in a matter of 2 to 3 weeks. There were a lot of vehicles
being scrapped at first and there still are. There were 18,000
cars totaled out in Joplin that day according to FEMA.”
Claudia Jeffries, a manager at Freeman Auto
Salvage in Joplin has not seen too many wrecked vehicles. “What
we have gotten in have been only the ones with liability insurance
only. The ones with full coverage get taken by the insurance
company and distributed to the different salvage pools in the
surrounding area. We’ve received about 110 cars so far.”
Business has picked up tremendously at Steve’s
Frame and Auto Body according to owner Steve Chenault. “We were
fortunate that our facilities were not hit by the tornado. We
had three of our employees who lost their homes totally and others
who suffered damage.”
Steve’s has been in business since 1981,
employs 22 people and operates a 23,000 sq. ft. full service
auto body repair and frame straightening service. “Before the
tornado it had been slower than normal because of the economy,
which hit the Midwest about a year ago, but this was really a
strong shot in the arm for everyone.
“You hate to have business because of someone’s
misfortune, but that’s life. It does happen. I feel badly for
people who did not have insurance, but I don’t understand our
government and FEMA. They were not only sending people here,
but to every shop in the area to get a damage estimate, which
takes two or three hours to do properly. They wanted us to do
them for free and I guess they are going to pay for the repairs.”
He continued, “Probably my biggest complaint
is with the insurance industry. Their catastrophe teams come
in and write a fast, glance-at-it estimate and the average consumer
gets cheated. They figure about half of the actual damage. The
consumer takes that money and the insurance companies are saving
billions of dollars by doing it that way. It really makes it
hard for us, or other repair facilities to take an estimate generated
by the insurance company that way and schedule that car based
on the information on that sheet because when you get the car
in here there’s much more damage.
“Flying debris, just things flying in the
air was probably the biggest thing. It broke out windows and
damaged sheet metal. A normal fender bender can take two to four
days, but a storm damaged vehicle can take three to four weeks.
It throws a monkey wrench in your daily operations to take on
a complete paint job. We haven’t painted a car complete in probably
10 years. A lot of these cars are damaged on every panel. It’s
very time consuming the way the new paints are. Everything has
to be disassembled. You have to remove handles and trim off the
vehicle. You can’t tape-off with masking tape like we used to.”
“We are now probably running 50 or 60 estimates
a day where normally we would write 8 or 10. We are now backlogged
about six weeks, but we are trying to save a little time in the
midst of all this chaos. We’ve gone in and replaced windshields,
back windows and door glasses to make cars temporarily drivable
and then schedule other repairs latter on.”
Chenault told us about an unusual phenomenon
that has occurred over the past few weeks that is causing even
more auto damage. People are visiting Joplin to view the tornado
damage. As they drive though town gawking at the rubble they
often stop suddenly and the car behind runs into them. “You try
to set some time to help these people but it’s hard to tell them
that you can’t for several weeks.
“We’ve hired two extra people, but in our
industry it’s very hard to get good technicians. Anyone who is
any good is usually already working. You have a lot of people
that think they are body people, but they are really not and
cannot meet our quality standards.
“We have a lot of scrap metal coming off
of cars. We have people that have been coming by here for years
and haul it over to Commercial Metals Company for recycling,”
Chenault concluded.
Danny Vandever, marketing manager at Commercial
Metals Company said that the tornado passed five blocks south
of their scrap metal yard and they escaped damage. “We were lucky.
All of our employees survived it. Several of them lost everything,
but we’re helping them all get through it, making sure they are
taken care of. We are very fortunate that all of our employees
and all their families survived.”
“We put on a few extra people. Anytime we
get busy we always direct traffic. We’ve had to do that before
the tornado hit. We have a plan in place for when the traffic
starts backing out, but we just had to do it a little more often
after the tornado. We’ve been here for 40 years at this location
right in the middle of town. We’ve always had a lot of peddler
and industrial trade so we are always busy,” he said.
“It was busier than normal. There were lots
of people out there. The city was allowing them to clean up scrap
metal from the curb out. There was not a giant amount of tonnage,
but there was a lot of volume, mostly tin, iron and nonferrous.
The bulk of it came in from long time customers. The traffic
count is way up, but the tonnage is not up that much because
the material did not weigh very much, mostly sheet metal, old
appliances and things like that, probably accounting for a 25
percent increase in volume.”
“We didn’t get in any cars. My guess they
are being stacked up and they’ll be going to salvage pools because
most of them were late models cars. I’m sure they will be going
to the salvage yards and will be parted out before they are scrapped.”
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