M&E Theft Arrests

[kilroy]

From today's Star Ledger. Wonder if the NIMBY's are behind this? I doubt it but...

Randy


Trio accused in theft of steel railway plates
Wednesday, October 26, 2005

KENILWORTH: Three men were arrested yesterday for allegedly stealing 400 steel plates belonging to a railway company and selling them to scrap dealers.

Allen Walker, 39, and Angel Acevedo, 30, both of Elizabeth, and Jeffrey Nest, 34, of Union Township were taken into custody about 9:40 a.m., according to Detective Sgt. Timothy Dowd. All three men were charged with theft and were being held in the municipal jail pending bail hearings.

Dowd said the steel plating was taken from a storage area behind a group of stores on the Boulevard. Each plate measured 12 by 12 inches, weighed about 5 pounds and fetched about $5 from the scrap dealers, Dowd said.

More than 1,000 steel plates belonging to the Morristown- based Morristown & Erie Railway were taken in the past three weeks, authorities said.

[pumpers]

One dollar a pound -- that's $2000/ton. Wow.
I know steel scrap has gone up a lot in past few years
due to good economy, CHinese economy, etc,
but I still thought scrap steel had gone from $200 to "only" the $300-$350/ton range!

Maybe they meant $1 per plate, not $5.

JS

[Metalrailz]

When this happens its usually for getting money to support their drug/alcohol habits.
New Construction sites are always having the copper tubing for plumbing being stolen.

[Camelback]

From today's Star Ledger. Wonder if the NIMBY's are behind this?

Probably not, but now they have a new argument against railroads to go along with "Our children will get cancer from licking creosote off of the ties."

"Railroads attract drug addicts who steal the steel plates to sell as scrap metal."

[Legio X]

The reference to Communist China and American scrap steel is very prescient. A great deal of the scrap steel sold by American scrappers is going to the P.R.C., where it becomes steel used in the construction of warships for the CHICOM Navy and tanks, self-propelled atillery and armored personnel carrieers for the CHICOM Army. This is notable because it is quite possible in the next five-ten years the U.S. and the P.R.C. will fight a mostly air- and naval war over Taiwan, which the U.S. is pledged to defend and which the P.R.C. has regarded as a renegade province since 1949 when Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Kuomintang Army escaped there with U.S. assistance in 1949. The P.R.C. has devoted a great deal of resources to their navy in order to make the amphibious invasion of Taiwan possible. Thus, scrap steel sales to the P.R.C. are not a good idea. Check out www.globalsecurity.org for more about this. This is looming on the horizon, but Iraq, Afghanistan and North Korea get all the attention in the news.

[kilroy]

History repeating istelf? The US sold tons of scrap steel to Japan in the 30's.