Omaha body shop overwhelmed with heavily damaged cars, increased collisions to blame

OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) - Seas of cars at Dingman’s Collision Center are still left to work on and the majority are heavily damaged.

Sean Ford is the manager at Dingman’s. He says his shop hasn’t seen something like this in 30 years.

“It’s been an increased volume for the majority of the year this isn’t something new in a month or two we’ve seen this kind of volume since late February,” Ford said.

Ford says they’ve also experienced supply chain issues and it’s taken them longer to get the necessary parts to fix up heavily damaged cars. He also said the cars they are seeing include some from deadly crashes like front-end collisions.

“We got vehicles that are damaged severely instead of something that takes three or four days to complete we got it for 10 to 15 days,” Ford said.

According to the Nebraska Department of Transportation, so far this year there have been about 181 fatal crashes. This is an increase from 134 at about the same tie last year.

Ford said he isn’t sure what’s causing all these collisions. He says Dingman’s has a shop in Florida where they’ve also experienced the same issue.

“They’ve also noticed an increase in the amount of work they have as well,” Ford said. “That is where I was mentioning that I am not sure this is a local problem.”

A problem that isn’t stopping him from meeting customer needs.

“It’s important that our repair process managers are explaining everything to our customers so they can make an informed decision,” Ford said.

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