When a disaster hits, most of what you see is the aftermath and relief efforts concentrated in that area. What you usually don’t see is the logistics of cleaning the area out, such as hauling away the flooded, ruined cars from a hurricane so residents can replace them and get back to everyday life.
In the case of being totaled in a natural disaster, vehicles often go to insurance auction once their owners have made a claim on them in order to get the cash for a replacement. But while they await an insurance sale, the cars—thousands and thousands of them—have to go somewhere.
When Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast in August, two areas designated as that “somewhere” were race tracks in the state: one, Royal Purple Raceway near Houston, which told ABC13 it plans to reopen for drag racing in 2018 and donate $10,000 to relief, and the other, College Station’s Texas World Speedway, which met its sad demise as a race track after a long history of ups and downs.
The cars will sit in storage indefinitely.
After Jalopnik shared some restricted-access photos of storage at Texas World, two drone photographers were so kind as to send us footage and photos from both that track, slated to become a housing development, and Royal Purple.
Here’s just how much of a spectacle it is to store post-hurricane flood cars, with this first video being from Royal Purple Raceway and Texas Aerials:
Texas World Speedway
Images and footage via Brazos Drones/Texomatic
Royal Purple Raceway
Images and footage via Texas Aerials (YouTube/Instagram)
What a sad yet incredible sight to see.