If you’ve ever spent a Saturday crawling through a salvage yard looking for a fender, a taillight, or that one impossible-to-find trim piece for a car nobody else loves, this one is going to hurt. The Median Fire ripped through Gooding County, Idaho this week and torched L&L Classic Auto, a family-owned salvage yard that has been hoarding automotive history since the 1960s. The damage isn’t a fender bender. It’s roughly 9,000 cars gone.
Keep reading:
- He Hunted Mercedes Sellers on Facebook Marketplace. A Federal Judge Just Handed Him 18 Years.
- The Wire Rundown: Corvette Wing Woes, a $15M GM Lawsuit, and Two Repeat Offenders
- The Corvette ZR1’s Giant Wing Is Quietly Chewing Up Its Own Paint Job
To put that in perspective: the yard had about 10,000 vehicles in its inventory. Manager Jesse Johnson estimates they lost around 90 percent of them, along with the office, every paper record the business kept, and a brand-new tow shop. Wind-driven flames don’t care about your provenance or your patina. By the time the fire was done, there wasn’t a corner of the lot that escaped untouched.
Johnson’s account of getting out is the kind of thing that makes your palms sweat. As the fire pushed toward Highway 46, he found himself in a wall of smoke he couldn’t see or breathe through, took a hard left into the desert in a roll-back, and essentially off-roaded his way to safety with the truck. He made it. The cars did not.
Here’s where the story goes from heartbreaking to infuriating, at least for anyone who has ever tried to insure something weird. According to Johnson, you basically cannot insure a yard full of junk cars. Premiums climb every year, and the coverage they did manage to keep only protects the building, and apparently only if a customer happens to catch fire while standing inside it. Thousands of cars reduced to scrap metal? That’s not a covered event. There is no check coming. The only thing this fire is paying out is hard work.\
Continue reading: 10 Car Accessories You’ll Actually Use
Then there’s Larry Harms, the 90-year-old owner who built this place over the better part of six decades. Johnson said the hardest part has been helping a man that age wrap his head around watching his life’s work burn down overnight. If you’ve ever known someone who poured their whole identity into a pile of cars and parts, you understand exactly why that detail stings the most.
And yet, the plan from here is exactly what you’d expect from a salvage-yard lifer: put your boots on, show up, and start digging through the wreckage to see what can still be saved. Whether L&L Classic Auto survives as a business is genuinely up in the air. Johnson admits it might not. But the instinct to come back the next morning and try anyway is the most car-person thing about this entire grim story.
Continue reading: 10 Best Safety Items for Your Car
L&L wasn’t the only casualty, either. The Gooding County Transfer Station across the highway lost its administrative building and is closed until crews can assess the damage. The Median Fire itself had grown to thousands of acres before crews finally stopped its forward progress and got it under control by Thursday morning. For a community out in the Magic Valley, that’s a lot of destruction in a single windy afternoon, and for the gearhead world, it’s the loss of a parts treasury that took 60 years to build and one fire to erase.
About the Author
