For years, a bronze statue of Alfred Salter sat on a bench looking out on a quiet bend of the River Thames, a memorial to a doctor who dedicated his life to a London district once infamous for Dickensian levels of poverty and disease.
Now the bench is empty after his statue fell victim to a wave of metal thefts sweeping Britain, threatening artworks and ravaging infrastructure as thieves seek to capitalize on soaring metal prices and a cash-in-hand scrap industry.
Memorial plaques and artworks are unsentimentally lumped along with electrical cables and drain covers in the hunt for illegal metal, which police say costs Britain hundreds of millions of pounds each year and kills two thieves a month.
Photo: Reuters
“He was an inspiration to many people and a tireless campaigner against social injustice and so it’s a great shame that thieves have now taken his memorial,” said Salter’s last remaining relative, Johanna Crawshaw, who has pledged to double a council reward for information leading to the statue’s return.
Reward posters are plastered all over Bermondsey, once home to a riverside slum depicted by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist, in the London borough of Southwark.
The borough was also the site of another metal theft earlier this month, from a public park where only two stumps remain of a valuable artwork by renowned British sculptor Barbara Hepworth.
The local government called the theft part of a “sickening epidemic.”
Churches have reported the theft of metal war memorials and on Thursday Britain’s Jewish Chronicle newspaper reported the theft of a bronze memorial commemorating Holocaust victims.
In Wales, University Hospital Llandough was forced to postpone more than 80 operations this month, including on cancer patients, after metal thieves targeted one of its generators.
“Staff and patients alike are appalled by this dangerous and irresponsible act and it beggars believe that anyone could stoop so low,” said Paul Hollard, deputy chief executive of Cardiff and Vale University Health Board.
The theft of rail network copper cables has caused thousands of hours of transport delays and the theft of power cables has plunged thousands of homes into darkness. Some hapless thieves have been killed trying to steal live electrical cables.
Since January 2009, the price of the type of copper popular with thieves has more than doubled on the London Metal Exchange.
Meanwhile, many more Britons’ finances are being squeezed by the harshest public spending cuts for a generation, part of government plans to tackle a big budget deficit.
Scrapyards said they pay about £3.50 (US$5.50) for a kilo of copper, depending on its quality and the market price on the day.
Some media have labeled metal theft an opportunistic “austerity crime” at a time of economic difficulty, but police increasingly point to organized crime networks using sophisticated techniques.
“Police have found adapted ladders, tools — and even vans that have specially adapted trapdoors to winch up a manhole cover as they drive over it without being observed,” London’s Metropolitan Police service said in a statement.
“In September 2011, four men were arrested .... using two bogus BT [British Telecom] trucks, a BT van and a winch to steal underground cable,” the statement said.
Protecting metal from thieves is especially difficult in rural areas, where the police presence is small.
The church in the Yorkshire village of Haworth, where the authors and sisters Charlotte and Emily Bronte are buried, has launched an appeal for cash to fix its roof, whose repeated targeting by lead thieves has hastened its disrepair.
“It’s a problem in rural England. These people have free rein to go pretty much undetected. We have a very small police presence. Our neighborhood policing team are great, but there’s only so much they can do .... We’re easy pickings,” said John Huxley, chairman of Haworth Parish Council.
Police are ramping up efforts to tackle the crime, with the Metropolitan Police last week launching a waste and metal theft task force, while police across England and Wales last month took part in a national “day of action” against the practice, during which they searched hundreds of scrapyards.
In England’s North East, which police say is the epicenter of railway metal theft, police are from this month trialing a system in which scrap sellers must prove their identity so that stolen metal can be traced.
A large chunk of Britain’s £5 billion-a-year scrap metal industry is cash-based, making it ideal for making money quickly without leaving a paper trail.
Parliament is considering a bill to toughen scrap dealing laws, including ending trade for cash and giving greater police and judicial powers to close rogue yards. The British Metal Recycling Association says a cashless system would drive business to illegal yards.
In the meantime, Southwark Council is carrying out a risk assessment of 165 pieces of public art in the borough, and might use closed-circuit cameras to monitor more valuable pieces or put them in storage until they can be made safe.
Two statues already in storage are of Salter’s daughter and her cat. Salter’s seated statue, within sight of London’s Tower Bridge, depicted him waving at his daughter in happier times, before she died of scarlet fever at the age of nine.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”