ST. BERNARD PARISH, La. — As the vast vehicular wreckage wrought by Hurricane Katrina is carted away, law enforcement and insurance officials are anticipating the arrival of tens of thousands of those vehicles on used-car lots across the nation.
Already there is anecdotal evidence of flood-damaged vehicles turning up on lots in Florida, Arizona, New York and Oklahoma, authorities said. Two months ago, at least seven 2005 Nissans listed in the National Insurance Crime Bureau database as hurricane-damaged were sold at an auction in Los Angeles.
A task force of insurance investigators and Louisiana law enforcement officials is building a database of flooded cars to try to prevent vehicles from being spruced up and foisted upon unsuspecting used-car buyers. The database at www.nicb.org lists more than 205,000 vehicles.
On a brisk afternoon this month, Tim Boucher stood in the median of a four-lane road in St. Bernard Parish checking the paperwork of truck drivers hauling away Katrina-damaged vehicles.
Boucher, a special agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau working on the database, said: "It's really going to be incumbent upon the consumer to check."
As he spoke, sport utility vehicles with an inch of mud and straw on the floor, minivans with seats cracked and puckered by water, and one car after another with the rank smell that comes from being submerged in muck were towed away.
Four months after Katrina swamped New Orleans and pounded the Mississippi coastline, thousands of vehicles remain on streets or buried under wreckage. Thousands more have been towed away into the murky and lucrative world of salvage cars.
Though most experts agree that cars that have been submerged in saltwater should never be driven, they also agree that as many as half of the vehicles that were damaged by Katrina probably will be rebuilt and resold.
About half of an estimated 500,000 vehicles that were damaged by the storm weren't covered by comprehensive insurance, and with no insurance money to buy a replacement, the owners may be enticed to clean them up and resell them.
Another factor encouraging resales is loopholes in the nation's system for tracking vehicles that have been totaled.
If a flood submerges a vehicle, many states require that the title reflect the damage by listing the car as "salvaged" or "flood-damaged." But experts agree that it is relatively easy for a rebuilder to buy a flood-damaged vehicle at auction, fix it up and "wash" the title of any evidence of the flooding by obtaining a new title in a state where title laws are weaker.
