Metal Is So Precious That Scrap Thieves Now Tap Beer Kegs — and just about any source of scrap metal:
In the past few months, Belgium’s main railway station has lost nearly all of its 800 aluminum luggage carts. German railway operator Deutsche Bahn says metal thieves recently dismantled and carted off three miles of idle rail track outside Weimar. In Beijing, a European commodities analyst noted, some 25,000 manhole covers have gone missing since the start of last year. They were replaced with concrete plugs.How bad is it getting? Last month, groundskeepers at the Royal Johor Country Club in Malaysia discovered that somebody had taken the aluminum cups from 12 holes on the golf links.
It’s a growing problem in the U.S., too, where crooks steal aluminum guardrails from highways and plumbing pipe from construction sites. Even military installations aren’t immune. Metal scroungers have stolen about $50,000 in booty from the Concord Naval Weapons Station east of Oakland, Calif., Pentagon officials estimate.
The thieves are growing more brazen. In Oregon, two men and a woman dressed in orange workmen’s vests arrived at the isolated Elkhorn Creek Bridge in the Willamette National Forest in November 2004. In broad daylight, they put out traffic cones, then dismantled crossbeams and handrails from the short bridge. They hit two more over the next year, according to the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency that owns some of the land. The bureau said the thieves trucked 3? tons of steel to a scrap yard outside Salem, the state capital.
With beer kegs, the crime spree began in the United Kingdom, where more than 250,000 wobbled out of circulation last year, according to the British Beer and Pub Association. Last fall, thieves scaled a chain-link fence and made off with 430 kegs in a single night from a storage yard belonging to Empire Distributors Inc. in Charlotte, N.C. The empty kegs had contained Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada and Pyramid brand beers. ‘I don’t know why they didn’t just ram the fence down,’ says Hank Bauer, Empire’s sales manager. Empire is now locking its kegs in a warehouse to keep them safe.