Aerial footage of an impound lot in Baltimore shows thousands of cars rusting away after being taken off the city’s streets by local authorities.
A new report from local news station Fox45 has been looking into the spate of car thefts that are rocking the region. While investigating what happens to stolen vehicles that are recovered by the police, the report went digging around the Baltimore City Impound Lot in the Pulaski Industrial Area of the city. Drone shots taken from above shows a snapshot of the cars that have been impounded after they were stolen, crashed or their owners picked up fines across the region.
The lot, which currently houses 3,076 vehicles in varying states of disrepair, is reportedly where stolen cars in the region go to await their collection. Alongside stolen cars, the lot also houses crashed and totalled vehicles, as well as many that are facing unpaid fines or have been impounded for other reasons, Fox45 reports:
DOT said 584 stolen vehicles were inside the facility on October 18, down from 653 stolen vehicles at the facility on September 26.
Among the rows of vehicles it the impound facility, FOX45’s drone captured images of mangled or damaged cars, skeletons of car frames, piles of tires, and a few boats.
Stolen cars in the lot spend, on average, 14 days out in the rain before they are collected by their owners. However, while the report found that the city has lifted fees to try and speed up the removal of some cars from the lot, residents that Fox45 spoke with reported a bureaucratic nightmare when it came to being reunited with their stolen vehicles.
According to one local resident, her car was stuck at the lot for around 30 days while she fought to have it released. In the process, she was forced to cough up $80 to cover speeding fines that the thieves picked up while driving her car.
“$80 dollars,” Cindy Garofalo told Fox45 News. “And now I have to go jump through hoops to try to get them to give my $80 dollars back.”
It’s not just stolen cars that are filling impound lots around the world. In China, a wave of outdated electric cars has been piling up, filling any empty space with hundreds of defunct EVs.