Although I worked in the impound industry for many years, I did not do a lot of repos, but enough to have some good stories.  The first repo I ever did was for a small credit agency, on an early 70's model Chevy Nova.  The credit agency rep wanted to ride along, and one of the drivers who worked with me also wanted to ride along, so we all piled into a Ford Diesel (not ideal for repos) with an Eagle Claw and headed out.

The car was parked at a motel.  Seemed strange to me that the rep knew it was at a motel.  Turns out the vehicle owner was a lady-of-the-evening, and she was working.  I didn't feel particularly nervous, but the credit agency rep apparently was, because he starting breathing rapidly and heavily, almost to the point of hyperventilation.
  The angle to the back of the car was tough, so I didn't quite get the Eagle Claws set before lifting, and it slid off.  Then I got nervous.  I dropped it twice more before getting the claws set right.  The gas tank got kind of messed up.  But we got the car, and the agency rep was happy.

Many years later, the company I was working for got a repo contract for another small credit agency.  For these cars, we had owner info, but no one to find the vehicle for us, so it was a hunt-and-tow set-up.  One of the addresses, for a Dodge mini-van, was out in a rural area, so I waited until late (around midnight) and drove out to check it out.  The address was a mobile home in a very rural area.  No lights anywhere, except for a large floodlight on the front of the mobile home.  There were cars everywhere--on the lawn, in the driveway, behind the mobile home--about 15 total, but no Dodge mini-vans.  I was about to leave, and then I saw, out in the field behind the mobile home, the outline of the rear of a mini-van.  It looked like the right vehicle, but it was well off the road, on the other side of the mobile home.  There wasn't even a driveway out to where it was.  I sat there for several minutes and thought about it.  There was no easy access to the front of the van, which was a front-wheel drive, and that made it even more risky.  Finally I decided it wasn't worth the risk, and I drove back to the shop.

One of the other drivers asked me about it, and I gave him the scoop.  He told me he was going to go try to get the mini-van.  I told him he was nuts, and I went home.  The next day I came into work, and there was the mini-van.  He had driven out to the house, turned off his lights, backed ACROSS the front lawn, into the field, slid the wheellift through the tall grass under the bumper of the van, threw his safety chains around the rear axle and into the chain slots on the crossbar, lifted it up on the chains, and drug it back across the lawn, IN PARK.  The grass was slick, so the wheels just slid without tearing up the sod.  He got it out on the road, dropped it, turned around and grabbed it from the front, and got out of there.  He told me that while he was throwing the safety chains around the rear axle, the one thought in his head was, "When is the gunshot coming?"

Another driver I worked with did a similar repo in a rural area late at night.  He had an address, and he mapped it out in his Thomas Guide (days before GPS navigation).  He drove for miles on a rural road, and then it turned into gravel.  He drove farther, and then there was a gate.  He drove farther, and then there was a mobile home, with the K-5 Chevy Blazer with oversized tires he was supposed to repo, parked within a few feet of the trailer.  He snagged it from behind with his Eagle Claw, strapped it, and took off.  He told me later, "I was in such a hurry I didn't lift the claws high enough, so when I went through a dip it exploded the ratchet when it hit the ground."  Exploded the ratchet.  It would have exploded my HEART.   Who keeps going on a rural gravel road THROUGH A GATE?!?

Probably what the vehicle owner was thinking as he slept peacefully through it all in his mobile home.


Have a safe and
profitable week,

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com 

In the impound tow world, we sometimes experience gatecrashers, vehicle owners who like to redeem their vehicle from the impound lot by force.  A common practice is to ram the gate full-force with a vehicle to knock it down.  You can do a lot of things to prevent this activity, or to prevent it from working.

At one of our impound lots, a vehicle owner did this successfully in the wee hours of the morning, but he was especially clever.  He hotwired a car to crash the gate, and then he drove his own vehicle out.  That prevented him from damaging his own car.  The next day we called the fence company out to fix the gate, which was damaged but didn't have to be replaced.

Well, apparently that 100-yard trip across the lot and through the gate in the hotwired car had impressed this guy with the performance of the car, because he came back the next night and crashed the gate AGAIN with this car, only this time he kept the car.  You have to appreciate the combination of skill, guts, and persistence this particular gatecrasher had.  My boss was in a tizzy, of course, but to us drivers, it was kind of amusing.

The story doesn't end there, of course.  Two nights later, I was sent out to impound a car from someone's driveway in the neighborhood of our impound lot.  It was a little strange, but someone had simply left their car in a graveled side driveway next to someone's house, clearly off the road and on private property.  The homeowner called the police first to make sure it wasn't stolen, and he was advised to have it towed away.

In the 20 minutes between the homeowner's call and my arrival, a DIFFERENT vehicle, being chased by the police, crashed into this first vehicle.  The driver t-boned this illegally parked car, pinning it against the homeowner's fence, bailed out and ran, and when I got there, the police were scouring the neighborhood for him.

I had to wait until they authorized me to move the escape vehicle away from the vehicle I was supposed to tow.  I wrote up an incident report while I was waiting, and another tow company showed up on a police rotation tow to impound the escape vehicle.  Then I completed my tow and went on my way.

The next day my boss was reading my incident report, and he recognized the vehicle description and license plate number of the escape vehicle as THE CAR THAT CRASHED OUR GATE TWICE.  This guy really got around, and this little Corolla he liked was very durable.  I hadn't recognized it, because there were several hundred cars in the impound lot, and I had never known for sure which one was creating all the havoc.  I don't think they ever caught the guy.  My boss called the other tow company and talked them into letting us get the car from them.  We blocked it in with two other vehicles, and no one ever claimed it.

Imagine the story from the gatecrasher's end.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,
Nick Kemper
www.TowPartsNow.com

Training, particularly Driver Training, is one of those fields that requires supreme patience.  I had one of the best Driver Trainers in the business working for me for several years at an impound company.  It helped that he had 25 years of experience and had won several state and regional driving competitions, both light- and heavy-duty.  He did most of the training, but before I would unleash the new Driver onto the unsuspecting public, I’d try to run a few shifts with the new Driver.

 I really wanted our female drivers to succeed, so we gave them the best training we could.  One evening I was working a swing shift with one of them, and things were going smoothly when I got a phone call from one of our carrier drivers.  He was in a rural area, doing a police impound, and he was stuck.  It was almost 10 pm, and I’d been at work since 8 that morning.  Boy, did I ever regret answering that call.

Sheila and I drove out to find him.  He was 20 miles outside of town, near a main river.  Some miscreants had evidently been doing something wrong, and the County Sheriff had busted them and had their 2 vehicles impounded.  They were on a dirt road a quarter-mile from the paved road.  Another driver had the smaller car and was waiting for us out at the paved road.  He didn't want to leave until we got there.  I soon found out why.

They’d been there for about 3 hours.  The police had broken up a group of people fishing down by the river.  They scattered when the police showed up.  When our drivers arrived, the police left.  When the police left, the people came back.  Fortunately, the police were nearby and returned to find that 2 of the people had outstanding warrants.  They arrested them and shooed everyone else away.  Again, they left (which is a little odd).

The larger vehicle was a 1-ton dually pickup, with no keys.  Noone would cough up the keys.  In the marshy terrain, this made it very difficult to position and load the vehicle.  If we would’ve had the keys, we would’ve just driven it out to the paved road and then loaded it onto the carrier.  The drivers got it onto the carrier, with great difficulty, but the ground was so slick, and our trucks had highway tires, so the driver could not get turned around and probably couldn’t have stayed on the slick road anyway.

The truck I was driving was a four-wheel drive, but still had highway tires.  Sheila and I drove out the goat trail and found the carrier driver.  After a lot of slipping, sliding, and general mayhem (both in the truck and on foot), we decided that to try to get the pickup out with the smaller wrecker.  We got the pickup off the carrier bed, and then, after about an hour of throwing mud, we were able to get it onto the wrecker.  The wrecker was an Eagle, and the pickup was a dually, so the Eagle Strap went up and over the inside dual tire and the ratchet was wedged between the dual tires.  Not ideal.

The goat trail wound through a forest, was narrow, and the mud was so slick that the front end of the pickup simply would slide to whichever side of the road had a downward slope to it, EVEN if we were stationary.  What a nightmare!  We backed the carrier down the road in intervals, winching off of side trees to pull the front of the pickup away from trees when it would slide over too far.  In the middle of all this, Sheila, the trainee (bless her soul--Sheila, I hold a special place in my heart for you--if you're reading this, don't take any of this personally), continually spouted off about how she had been "four-wheeling all her life" and had been "stuck worse than this many times" and offered one crazy suggestion after another.  The winching off the side trees might have been one of them, and I'll give her credit--that worked for awhile.  But the carrier simply couldn't maneuver in the mud, which was getting worse as it got colder and damper.

Finally, I got a little momentum and made it around a couple of bends in the road, and then we came to a rise in the road, followed by about a hundred-foot passage across a swamp (not much water--just mud and tall grass), where the road had been built by dumping fill-dirt into the swamp.  The road was crowned (bad).  I made it over the rise, and about 30 feet across the swamp, and the front end of the pickup took a dive down to my left and into the swamp, wedging against a log submerged in the swamp.

That was a far as we were going to get.

The carrier driver's radio wasn't working well, and I think his cell phone was dead.  He was still back with the carrier.  I finally got ahold of him, told him to lock up the carrier, and walk out to us.  I found a knife and cut the straps off the tow truck and was able to pull away from the pickup.  When the carrier driver got there, we loaded into the cab of the truck and drove back to the shop.  It was 3 a.m. when we got back, and I spent about an hour housing mud off of and out of the wrecker.

Around 7, I called Mitch, my trainer.  I told him the nature of the mess, and where it was, and I went back to bed.  At 11, I woke up, got in my car, and headed out there.  I got a message that the pickup was out and in the storage lot, and they were going back for the carrier.  I also got a call that the vehicle owner was on his way to the storage lot to get the pickup.  I got to the storage lot about 15 minutes ahead of the vehicle owner.  I inspected the pickup--muddy, but no damage, which is amazing, because I remembered bouncing it off a few trees before leaving it in the swamp.  I wrote up an invoice for approximately $750.  The owner showed up a few minutes later, paid in full in cash, and drove it away.  I drove out to the scene, and there was Mitch, with a different trainee, loading up carpet remnants and buckets of heavy gravel they had brought to help them, onto the carrier bed, at the paved road.  They were done and ready to head back.

Unbelievable.

Have a safe and profitable week.

Sincerely,

Nick Kemper

www.TowPartsNow.com