Sascha Wil­son

Scrap met­al has be­come such a lu­cra­tive busi­ness in T&T that peo­ple are now re­sort­ing to steal­ing iron man­hole cov­ers. Res­i­dents of Bank Vil­lage, Cara­pichaima, woke up yes­ter­day to find eight ex­posed man­holes along the pave­ment be­tween Robert Street and St Mary's Junc­tion.

The man­hole cov­ers mea­sured five feet in length, two and half feet in width and three to four feet in depth. Pres­i­dent of the Bank Vil­lage Com­mit­tee, Ronald Gan­gadeen, said this sit­u­a­tion posed a dan­ger to res­i­dents, stu­dents from the near­by Wa­ter­loo Sec­ondary School and all pedes­tri­ans. He said the scrap met­al thieves struck ei­ther Thurs­day night or ear­ly yes­ter­day.

"This morn­ing around 6 am I was go­ing to buy my dai­ly news­pa­pers as usu­al and I see the man­hole cov­ers miss­ing," he said. "My con­cern as a leader in the com­mu­ni­ty is that, for the peo­ple and school chil­dren walk­ing, it is a dan­ger­ous thing." Gan­gadeen said he saw a five-foot caiman in one of the man­holes. "I get fright­en when I see that," he said.

He be­lieves the cov­ers were stolen by met­al scrap scav­engers.

He said: "It hap­pen­ing all over the coun­try...there are these guys buy­ing scrap met­al. Peo­ple take this (cov­er) be­cause of its weight. It's very sol­id and heavy. You can get be­tween $1,300 and $1,600 per tonne for scrap met­al." He called on the au­thor­i­ties to re­place the cov­ers ur­gent­ly.