NY airport housing thousands of vehicles Superstorm Sandy

Calverton Executive Airpark is a small regional airport on the east end of Long Island that serves private planes during the warmer months and shuts down every winter, leaving its wide expanse of pavement empty for months. But that changed after Hurricane Sandy. Insurance Auto Auctions Inc, a salvage auto auction company specializing in total-loss vehicles, acquired tens of thousands of cars and trucks that were swamped, damaged or destroyed by the storm and needed a place to store the vehicles. So the company approached the Town of Riverhead, which owns the airport, and the two struck a deal: $3,200 per month per acre. IAA brings in the vehicles on trailers, stores them at the airport and auctions them online.