A Seriously Decomposed Car

[queerbychoice]

Today I read a news article online stating that 500 acres practically right next door to where I live burned down yesterday. Luckily, the 500 acres contained nothing much that anybody will miss; the news article says it was just 500 acres of dead grass. But since the fire was right in my neighborhood, and since it was safely extinguished yesterday, I wanted to go look at the burned area. So I drove to the exact intersection that the fire was supposedly nearest to, and looked around . . . but there wasn't a blackened field anywhere in sight, as far as I could see. Did I blink and miss 500 acres? Apparently by being "near" this intersection, what the news article really meant was that it was miles and miles away from the intersection but there was just no other intersection between this one and the fire. I sure do live in the middle of nowhere.

However, while driving around in the middle of nowhere, I did find something else to photograph. I found the most severely decomposed car I've ever seen in my life. I wonder how long a car has to sit by the side of a road before it gets this bad. It looks like it may have been burned at some point.

My first sight of it:




Closer up:




Think if we have a look under the hood, we might be able to get it working again?




The pieces of its windshield look curiously like broken wine bottles - they somehow manage to look both greener and more curved than I would expect of a car windshield.




Care to sit down in the remains of the front seat?




Or maybe you'd prefer the back seat?




I never realized car doors could wilt like cut flowers.




I wonder what color this car started out being.




Judging by the lettering still etched above what used to be its back bumper, I can tell you it started out as a Chevrolet Camaro.

Comments

[comeoneileen.livejournal.com]

WOW.

The paint has gone all powdery! It looks like mold!

It looks so organic.

[mmmmjournal.livejournal.com]

ha, what a jalopy. I love it. :)

[fathoms-deep.livejournal.com]

What has come from the earth, to the earth shall it return...

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Yeah - particularly the stuff on the ground behind the back bumper looked so organic that if the car hadn't been there to suggest its origin, I could have sworn it was a dead animal.

[grimreaper3248.livejournal.com]

That car is no more then 5 years old. It burned and recently.

It burned for one of 3 reasons.
1. Accidental ignition from defect or the cat caught the grass on fire.
2. Insurance fraud.
3. Stolen and burned to remove fingerprints and other evidence link it to the thief.

You should see what a torched corvette looks like. Seat frames, Hoop over windshield, floor pans and engine block If its hot enough even the rims melt away and just leave the steel belts of the tires.

[styphon.livejournal.com]

i was going say that looked like a final generation camaro =p

[pure-agnostic.livejournal.com]

Looks like a few dead cars I saw along the road near Pa'ia, Maui, Hawai'i. Every kilometer, we saw another dead car, and some were as decomposed as the Camaro.

[totnesmartin.livejournal.com]

Reminds me, Mad Max was on Telly a coupla nights ago... Strange things have happened to that car. Perhaps it was melted by aliens.

[avador.livejournal.com]

Yea, I was going to say the same thing. My grand am was in the driveway when my hot water heater blew up and took the house with it, and my car too. The melted fiberglass gets that same sort of powdery look someone mentioned above. PLus, all the crap melted around the bottom. You can tell it is a newer Camaro from the back end design. You'd think Highway Patrol would have carted it away? Since it was probably a crime scene.

[xkcd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's not so much 'decomposed' as just burned. Cars don't wilt like that from being old, they mostly sit still and rust. I don't think it's a very old car. And the windshield is probably like it is due to fire.

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

It's not on a highway - it's on a back road so rarely used that I was able to stand around in the middle of the road taking all those pictures of it and not a single other car drove by while I was there. So maybe the authorities haven't yet learned of its existence?

[avador.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that makes sense. That was probably quite a fire though, by the damage done to the car. It's a good thing it didn't set the brush around it on fire. Summer in Arizona, a cigarette flicked out the window is enough to torch miles, even with fire fighters on site. A car on fire like that, would be really dangerous.

[avador.livejournal.com]

Dur, you're in CA, so I don't have to tell you about the summer wildfires :)

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

And the reason I found the car in the first place was that I was looking for the evidence of a 500-acre wildfire in the same area that just happened on Saturday. ;-)

[avador.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read that part and curious to see where you where from I snuck by your journal. They have just now got the 250,000 acre fire fifteen miles from my house 95% contained. It was spooky, the whole mountain range directly behind me was burning for two weeks, and the smoke was so thick it choked you when you went outside. All I had to do to find that one was look out the window, and I did not like it!

[queerbychoice.livejournal.com]

Eeek! The 500-acre one was no more than 5 miles from me, but it was extinguished before I ever heard that it had happened at all. If I'd known, I might have been rather worried. Apparently the smoke was all blowing in the opposite direction, plus I was only outside for a few minutes that day.

In California, the really huge wildfires are usually way south of me, so I haven't previously thought of my area as being a place where one of those could happen. But now I'm not sure it was much other than luck that enabled them to extinguish this one before it got a lot bigger.

[nessachan.livejournal.com]

It really does look like a dead animal.