The New York Times On Your Side

The good news is that they finally found your car underneath tons of rubble. The bad news is that you have to pay to have it towed away:

Denise Jack got a good news-bad news phone call from an insurance company yesterday regarding her blue 1993 Nissan Pathfinder, which was buried by an avalanche in Upper Manhattan last year and has been sitting beneath the mountain of dirt on Riverside Drive ever since.

The good news was that after more than a year of waiting and frustration, her sport utility vehicle would soon be dug out.

The bad news was that she would have pay to have the S.U.V. — or the presumably flattened hunk of metal, glass and rubber that was once her car — towed away.

“They said they were about to dig out the cars and needed my documents to see if they could settle it,” Ms. Jack said. “That made me hopeful, but then they said it was my responsibility to have the car towed away once it was dug out.”

On the morning of May 12, 2005, Ms. Jack parked the Pathfinder on Riverside Drive next to a 75-foot-high retaining wall beneath the Castle Village apartment complex near 183rd Street.

When the wall gave way that afternoon and collapsed onto the Henry Hudson Parkway, it buried the stretch of Riverside Drive where Ms. Jack’s vehicle and several others were parked. There the S.U.V. sat as the seasons rolled by, beneath a two-story mountain of dirt, debris and uprooted trees.

Since her car insurance policy did not cover landslides, Ms. Jack filed a claim with the Greater New York Mutual Insurance Company, which insures Castle Village. Yesterday, she said, that company contacted her to say that the cars would be dug out soon, and asked her to fax some ownership and registration documents to them. And, they said, she should be ready to pay for towing costs.

“I definitely don’t think I should be accountable for removing the car,” Ms. Jack said. “I didn’t know the wall was going to fall when I parked there. It wasn’t even that great of a parking spot.”

Backstory: Retaining Wall to Henry Hudson Parkway: Drop Dead, Rvr Vus.