FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA. (WSVN) - Rising waters forced many drivers to swim to safety after they wound up stranded in the street. Now, car owners are asking what’s next.
Broward Sheriff’s Office dispatchers have been busy with flooded cars since the overnight hours on Thursday.
“We have several vehicles over here in high water, disabled,” said a dispatcher.
With the light of day, tow trucks came to the rescue, while others still waited.
“The battery is probably dead,” Bill Cuhm said. “Yeah, that battery is probably dead, and my key fob won’t work.”
So, for five hours with a dead car battery, Cuhm has been trying to simply get into his car with a coat hanger.
“I gotta see if I can jump it and see what’s going on with it, but I don’t know,” he said. “From the looks of it, it might be gone.”
Now that the water is finally receding in some areas, it is like a graveyard of cars left abandoned and left behind.
In just one block area, there are more than a dozen cars, some in the middle of the road.
“Your car was not designed to swim,” said Ben Levy with Wales Garage. “Electric car, gas car, hybrid car, it’s not a boat.”
Levy, a longtime mechanic, said most of these cars are now junk.
“They’re totaled. Your insurance company is going to total them,” he said. “That’s what it comes down to nowadays, is once cars go swimming, once they hit a fish, they’re totaled.”
Levy said the main issue is waterlogged electronics in the cars.
“If your car gets filled up with water, or you drive it through deep water and it stops, it’s gonna kill the motor, it’s gonna kill the electrical system,” Levy said. “There’s nothing left; it’s totaled.”
He said cars can have up to 30 computers inside, and fixing them will cost more than the car is worth.
“You can put new engines in them, new transmissions in them, you can replace a couple of different computers, but they’re never going to be right,” Levy said.
And he is already warning future buyers.
“You will definitely see these cars show up on the auctions. They’ll be getting rebuilt titles and getting re-certified for sale, but they’re just never going to be right,” he said. “No, we are not accepting flood-damaged cars, because of the amount of time and space they take up for insurance companies to show up.”
One thing to remember is that in Florida, vehicle owners need comprehensive insurance to cover claims from flooding.
“[Insurance companies are going to be] writing checks left, right, forward, backwards and sideways,” Levy said.
In Aventura. Wednesday night, the downpour ultimately brought people together, like two teens who helped push people to safety.
“The Audi that I helped push, the owner of the car was a tourist from Greece, actually, so he wasn’t from around here, so we gotta help each other out,” said Axel Ramirez, one of the teens
It is a good reminder in the coming days, as South Florida deals with the aftermath of the flooding frustration.
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