Junk cars were used to too line the riverbank to stop erosion?

are they still there...= )

 

my dad used to pick up the cars haul them down the river and put them standing up on the banks then run a big cable through them and bury them partially he said the first big rain storm would and wash them away and he would have to do it again. that was back in Tucson, AZ. that last car you have in your pics was a time capsule in OK they barried it with a bunch of stuff in it then they dug it up a few years back. its in a rust remover website. they used there rust remover on it. it came out pretty clean.

 

I don't know why these cars are here, it's in a gulley near a railroad track, there are a LOT of cars, appears they were put there in the late 60s mostly. Could have been for erosion prevention.



I remember seeing railroad boxcars used to slow erosion on the bank of a wash by a junkyard in Tucson when I was a kid. Later, when I worked at that junkyard, the boxcars were gone...

 

Heres a bridge plaque from that road before they re-routed it.

 

They used them in the river near us to build a bridge,,made a dam out of em then dropped em in the piers with the concrete

 

I guess he meant it was used to shore up flat ground in downtown Tulsa.


Also, I'm pretty sure the third photo was from a thread here a few years back where someone was looking around behind an old junkyard. Certainly not shoring up a riverbank.

 

amen. why is it in the thread. it has nothing to do with cars used for soil errorsion in rivers.

 

They don't do it now because research has showed that car bodies in gullys and river banks actually speed up flow causing more problems,hence the washing away of bodies in floods. In out back OZ farmers have removed old cars ( tractors,trucks you name it) and replaced them with native trees as better form of erosion control.

 

Checkout the "Pics of river cars." thread (click HERE) and the "Ever wonder what happened to all the cars in Oklahoma ?" thread (click HERE) ... all kinds of cool pics of "erosion control."

 

Part of me thinks it would have been fun watching 'em roll of the bank

 

Yep. There was an auto wrecker named RIVERSIDE AUTO WRECKERS in a town I lived in that would push selected cars off the riverbank along the back of their lot in an attempt to stop bank erosion. Over the years, from the 1950s and forward, the river filled the cars with muck and the bank moved back, reversing the bank erosion to the other extreme, causing a minor change in the course of the river, subsequently threatening the structure of a bidge nearby. The Lot was re-surveyed in the 1980s, with the size of the lot having grown appreciably. It took a court order to force the owner of the property to dig out a lot of the cars, in an attempt to get the river back to it's original position. Still ongoing, but it's now against the law in that county to dump cars in the river.

 

I have heard it was done here in Shreveport on the Red River. Wonder what I have been walking over sometimes!

 

Better settle down Ill Rip Rap your caddy!!! Ill do it I'm CRAZY!!!! All i need is a shovel !!!!

 

wow cool!!!

 

Thats freeking NUTS !!!! I would have shit my pants!!!

 

Better call me when you do that!! Ill Even supply the beer!!

 

There is corral made of cars not too far from were i live . the old mjust turned them up on their sides and barb-wired them together...seems like wooden posts and wire wwould have taken alot less effort but go figure

 

As a kid, I remember seeing cars along the creek in Kentucky where some of my mom's side of the family lived (Floyd County, KY if anyone cares). Its funny but I remember thinking even then that it was a real shame. Last time I was up there 4-5 years ago you could still see the occasional remnant of a car. But, nothing had been added in quite a while.

 

LOL rip rap it up holmes!

 

I have never seen some shit like this....why would they ever think it to be a good idea to put cars in the river. what a waste of what could have been some awesome sheetmetal

 

There are a bunch of cars in the Fraser River east of Vancouver at the west end of Derby Reach park

 

For us it seems like the stupidest shit ever but for people that are not concerned with old cars it makes complete sense. A lot of times the cars were used as an preventative erosion measure. By placing the cars there, they prolonged the side walls of a river bank from eroding which was sometimes the led to loss of use to a particular piece of land. It costs a great deal of money to deal with it in a proper manner such as bringing in breaking rocks to serve the same purpose. This is just another example of back yard engineering.

Or on the flip side, someone could have just done that so they did not have to look at a pile of shit anymore. Either way it's not good for anyone wishing to build a car from one of them. Sighhhhhhhh.

 

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Are those cars still there? I am sure anything of value has been picked through...Thats last picture looks like a nice 55 chevy trunk lid...

 

Used to canoe the local waterways back in the early 70's and there was a big pile of cars along one riverbank, back then I just thought they were junkcars, you know just some junk from the fifties. They were only 15-20 yrs old at the time, that'd be like seeing some mid eighties junk pushed over the riverbank now.

 

There were some along the miami river in the cincy area upstream from edgewater,its been a couple years since I was there and they were mostly mid 50s to realy 60s.

 

watching the weather channel i saw film of Corps Of Engineers crews dropping cars bought off used car lots, junkyards, etc, into breached levees to stem the flooding. it didn't work; the force of water just swept the cars away from the breach immediately. still, they were trying to do something, even if it was wrong. where i was raised in Virginia cars and truck often surfaced that had been swept away during the big storms Hurricane Camille brought in 1969. my folks and i would drive along the banks of the Piney River and see hulks of cars all mangled up.

 

Rip Rap is a term used to describe large rocks that are used to line rivers and such along their banks to stop erosion. It is also used around lock and dams on each end of the locks where the tugboats enter and exit; as they turn on the power, the turbulence churns up the water that erodes away the river banks.
One summer, on a construction job, we hauled large rip rap- boulders 2-4 feet in diameter-and dumped em into the Mississippi River at one lock and dam for the whole summer. We couldn't believe that erosion was that bad to dump that much rock into them all summer, and never did fill those holes up!

 

growing up my uncle Jack Worley had property on the Little Miami river in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and he lined the banks with vintage cars. at the time (1967-72) i thought it was cool. then when my interest in cars exploded, I thought it was the worst thing I'd ever seen in my life. they're still there, whatever's left that is.

 

I remeber seeing old cars buried in the beach in westerly Rhode Island. but they have all been pulled out of there now.

 

My buddys old man said they would drive their cars into the river to wash em, but they drove em out. Its fucked up to say, but there is a lot of that sheet metal on those that is better than what we have up here in ohio