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Show Page 20 SpecialFeatures Monday, Aug. 24, 2009 For killed clunkers, it’s a long journey to auto heaven Catch yourself saying,”Hey, I could have used a clunker?” By Michael S. Rosenwald The Washington Post WASHINGTON — Killing a clunker takes patience and intestinal fortitude. Five minutes ago, a hulking Infiniti Q45 at Fitzgerald Auto Mall in Germantown, Md., guzzled a lethal dose of sodium silicate — liquid glass that hardens engine arteries. A technician keeps stepping on the gas. The Q45 keeps purring. “She’s holding on,” says Scott Addison, a Fitzgerald manager watching the execution while puffing a thick cigar. Then the car begins coughing. “This is a terrible way to kill a car. This is suffering.” The cough gets louder. “Here it goes,” Addison says. Silence. Time of death: 1:33 p.m. Hundreds of clunkers surround him, awaiting their fates. Not even “Obama ‘08” bumper stickers can save these gas-guzzlers from the 435,000-vehicle sell-off created by the president’s “Cash for Clunkers” program. Addison calls this sea of discarded vehicles Clunkerville, but this is no car’s final destination. Even after their engines are silenced, the inhabitants face a long journey to auto heaven. Dead clunkers embark on an odyssey through family businesses nearly as old as the car industry. Auctioneers in Elkridge in Howard County, Md., shout “$25, $25, $25, do I hear $50?” to salvage buyers who then take their winnings to junkyards to be picked over for parts. Junkyards eventually sell what’s left of the clunkers to processors, who use mammoth shredders to chew the cars into tiny pieces of scrap metal that are later recycled into steel. Almost nothing is wasted. This gritty side of the car business is largely unseen in a country where the dominant image of the automotive industry is pristine cars rolling down production lines. But the Cash for Clunkers program, which has gas guzzlers piling up at dealerships around the country, is bringing into focus the $22billion-a-year auto recycling business and its many colorful characters. People wonder: Where does all this stuff go? “It’s sort of like flushing a toilet,” said David Simon, the president of Baltimore Scrap, one of the region’s largest car shredders. “This aspect of the recycling industry is often out of sight, out of mind for the general public.” After the government-mandated engine killings — a measure that assures the old cars cannot be resold — clunkers are either trucked to auctions or sold by dealers directly to outfits like Crazy Ray’s in Jessup, Md. Crazy Ray’s is what’s known as a you-pull-it operation, meaning that customers dive into the heap and find their own spare parts. The owner is Joe Duff, a bubbly fellow with a heavy Baltimore accent, who sits at a desk on a slightly elevated stage. Outside, sweaty men haul tool boxes to extract parts from his inventory. Duff picked up a handful of clunkers this week at Manheim Total Resource Auctions in Elkridge. Winning bids: $150 to $250 each. His junkyard rules are strict, his prices non-negotiable. You come out with a brake drum, that’s $10.37, cash. Intake manifold, $25.47, cash. Crazy Ray’s web site warns: “We do not keep an inventory. It is constantly rotating.” If you are not out by 5:15 p.m., the prices double. Duff runs a tight operation. He has to, he said, because of the shenanigans some parts hunters pull. Not long ago, a man walked up to the cash register, all hunched over. He put a cylinder head on the counter but remained hunched over. The attendant asked him to lift up his shirt. “He had another cylinder head stuck down his pants,” Duff said. “Complete with rockers and all.” Despite the hassles, Duff said, it’s a good business. Cars break; people need parts. Clunkers come along; parts are replenished. CLUNKERS RECYCLE: Mark Rhodes, general manager of Brandywine Automotive in Charles County, Md. He prepares a car for the junkyard, to be smashed and never used again. This gritty side of the car business is largely unseen in a country where the dominant image of the automotive industry is pristine cars rolling down production lines Washington Post photo by Jonathan Newton. Yin-yang. Looking out his office window, Duff said: “There’s a guy buying a door. That’s $50. That rear hatch there, that’s $65. There’s a guy over here getting tires. A car lasts 30 days or so around here. Here’s a guy bringing up a rear seat. That’s 25 bucks.” Other junkyards are slightly more orderly. Fitzgerald sold the Q45, circa 2000, for about $150 to Brandywine Auto, which towed it 53 miles to the company’s 40-acre facility in Charles County. Brandywine Auto, which dates to 1927 and is still owned by the Meinhardt family, sells car parts to body shops, insurance companies and individuals who repair their own vehicles. Think legal chop shop. “We go in and take ‘em all apart,” said Mark Rhodes, Brandywine’s general manager. Brandywine’s dismantlers might be called organ transplant surgeons. The patients roll into four dismantle bays all day long and the surgeons remove the guts: starters, tail lights, calipers, batteries, mirrors, doors. A dismantler can take apart two cars a day, and the parts can fetch anywhere from $35 (Q45 starter) to $800 (‘98 Corvette door) and beyond, turning clunkers into potential ATMs for Brandywine. From the dismantle bays, the cars are lined up in a sprawling field, in neat rows of Fords, GMs, Chryslers, and imports. When a vehicle is picked clean, when there isn’t much left except for the frame and old McDonald’s wrappers, a forklift picks up the carcass as if it were as light as a book, sliding it into a crusher that flattens the remains in less than 30 seconds. The industry term for this moment is EOL — end of life. “I call it `gone,’ “ Rhodes said. Election observers cite cases of finger-cutting By Laura King Los Angeles Times KABUL, Afghanistan -- The shadowy threat circulated in city streets and village bazaars in the days before Afghanistan’s historic presidential vote: The Taliban would cut off the ink-stained fingers of those who had cast a ballot. On Saturday, election observers disclosed that they had confirmed two such cases in the south of Afghanistan, and were investigating a third in an eastern province. The two known finger amputations took place in Kandahar province, where the Taliban movement was born. Officials asked that the district not be disclosed because it would endanger the observer who reported the grisly act. The case under investigation was in an Afghan province bordering Pakistan’s volatile tribal areas, where many insurgent groups are based. The voters in question, whose fingers were stained with telltale purple ink, were attacked by insurgents soon after voting Thursday in presidential and provincial assembly elections, said Nader Nadery, who heads the Free and Fair Election Foundation of Afghanistan, the country’s premier domestic election-monitoring group. No further details about the attack were disclosed. The south of Afghanistan, where insurgents and Western troops have clashed fiercely this summer, was considered the most dangerous place to vote. Despite intensive efforts by U.S. and other Western forces to safeguard the balloting, many people in the south stayed home. An overall turnout figure has not been compiled, but it will be a major factor in determining the vote’s legitimacy. The finger-cutting disclosure came as domestic and foreign monitoring groups began offering detailed appraisals of the vote, in which incumbent President Hamid Karzai faced three main rivals and more than two dozen other contenders. To win in a first round, a candidate needs more than 50 percent of the vote. Karzai’s camp has expressed optimism he will win outright; aides of his chief rival, former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, have said they are all but certain the contest will go to a runoff. Preliminary results are to be announced Tuesday, but a final tally is not due until September. Monitoring groups generally have described the vote as flawed, but successful in that it took place at all. Violence had surged in the weeks leading up to the vote. Various observer groups have raised concerns such as women having been denied full voting rights, regional patterns in the low turnout that could have skewed the result, and the wealth of opportunities for fraud provided by a faulty voter-registration process. The dipping of voters’ right index fingers in indelible ink was a measure intended to prevent fraud, but the tactic spawned controversy after claims the ink could be easily washed off with a common laundry product. But there is actually one more stop. After clunkers have been picked apart and flattened, they are sold to shredders. Brandywine often uses Baltimore Scrap, located in an industrial shipping area not far from the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. Baltimore Scrap is run by David Simon. The scrap man’s grandfather founded the business in Pennsylvania nearly 100 years ago with little more than a horse and wagon; Simon’s three brothers and their 83-year-old father work the yard now. The other day, Simon stood outside and watched trucks pull up onto a scale. Simon pays by the hundredweight or ton. A typical 3,000-pound car might cost him between $100 and $200. Every evening, the flattened vehicles feed into his 300-foot-long, 60-foot-wide shredding apparatus and, after being chewed up by a 3,000-horsepower motor, are spit out into tiny, unrecognizable pieces of metal. The piles of this stuff around the facility are high enough that one wouldn’t climb them without a rope. Simon in turn sells the metal to steel manufacturers, which meld it into railroad rails, heavy machinery, steel plates, maybe even car parts. Some of his customers are close by, perhaps in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Others are distant, in China or India, for example. That means the Q45 clunker that sputtered and fought and then died in Germantown actually lives on, in bits and pieces, around the world — in developing countries building their infrastructures or maybe even returning just a few blocks away at a depot that receives new cars. This irony is not lost on anyone operating on the EOL side of the car business. As Simon said, “It’s all just a big circle.” Converts targeted by dedicated Muslims By Jeffrey Fleishman Los Angeles Times ALEXANDRIA, Egypt -- It is a clear day along the coast, but in a bungalow off the beach, Maher El Gohary sits behind a locked door with an open Bible and a crystal cross, suspicious of every voice and sandal scraping past outside. He and his daughter, Dina, live like refugees, switching apartments every few months, not wanting to get close to neighbors. Gohary’s life has been threatened, his dogs have been killed and it’s been suggested that he’s insane or possessed by spirits. He is a man this Muslim nation cannot fathom: a convert to Christianity. “Islam is the only thing Egyptians are 150 percent sure of. If you reject Islam, you shake their belief and you are an apostate, an infidel,” he says. “I can see in the eyes of Muslims how much my conversion has really hurt them.” Egypt’s Coptic Christians, who represent about 10 percent of the population, have a history that veers from coexistence to violence with the Muslim majority. Bloody clashes recently erupted between Copts and Muslims over land disputes and restrictions on churches. But converts, such as Gohary, are even more unsettling. Islamists believe that Muslims who forsake their religion should be punished by death. Gohary wants to be called Peter and refuses to yield. He has filed a lawsuit asking an Egyptian court to recognize him as a Copt by changing the denomination on his national ID card from Muslim to Christian. The court ruled against him last month, finding that Gohary’s baptism documents from the Coptic Orthodox Church were “legally invalid.” The verdict is on appeal. The case highlights the religious and political complexities that drive modern Egypt. The nation often seems at battle with itself as it attempts to balance the ideals of a democracy with laws steeped in Islamic principles. Freedom of religion is guaranteed in the constitution, but fatwas and religious edicts subject converts from Islam to persecution and threats. The government treads uneasily, not wanting to anger religious conservatives who guard Islam’s grip on society. Converts such as Gohary “should be killed by authorities,” says Abdul Aziz Zakareya, a cleric and former professor at Al Azhar University. “Public conversions can lead to very dangerous consequences. The spreading of a phenomenon like this in a Muslim society can cause many unwanted results and tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims.” A tall man in blue shorts and rimless glasses, Gohary, 56, looks as if he is ready to walk the beach. But he and Dina have just moved to the three-room bungalow. Their suitcases are still packed; the only thing on the walls is a clothesline. Listening for noises outside, Gohary speaks of how years earlier the teachings of Jesus, especially parables on forgiveness and loving your enemy, changed his life. “In Islam, if you steal your hands are cut off, but in Christianity you can be forgiven,” he says. “This compassion is what attracted me.” Back then he was a young cadet at the police academy, inspired by a Christian bunkmate who ignored the taunts of Muslim recruits. Gohary, the son of a police general, began reading the Bible. He left the academy and by his mid-20s had drifted away from Islam and was calling himself a Christian. He went through a series of jobs, he says, but was often fired or quit after being harassed when it was discovered he was no longer a Muslim. He married in 1994, but his wife refused to convert. The couple divorced, and Dina was tugged between faiths. “I’ve always felt Christian,” says Dina, a 15-year-old who doesn’t look away when she speaks. “But my mom has taken me to sheiks to convince me of Islam. She made me wear the hijab and go to the mosque against my will. My father and I are in danger. A man with a beard once grabbed me and told me, `If you and your dad don’t stop, I’ll kill you both.’ “ In 1997, Gohary remarried and later moved to a farm. His second wife converted to Christianity. Her family and friends were angry, and Gohary says the farm was vandalized, his trees cut down, his dogs killed. He sold the property, and he and his wife and Dina planned to move to Cyprus. Dina’s mother and Gohary share custody of their daughter, and authorities did not allow her to leave Egypt. Gohary and his wife spent a year in Cyprus, but he returned to ensure that Dina was exposed to Christianity. Gohary says he received a baptismal certificate from the Coptic Orthodox Church in Cyprus in 2005 after having been baptized by an archbishop in Egypt. The court rejected both certificates, questioning the jurisdiction of the documents and saying there was no “clear evidence” of baptism. Says Gohary: “I’m not so much afraid of the government anymore. It’s conservative Muslims who worry me.” |
