- You can’t really blame the police for being weirded out over someone stealing a whole bridge.
It’s common knowledge that thieves will steal pretty much anything that’s not nailed down. But last month some crooks really overdid themselves.
A bizarre theft has left the police in Akron, Ohio, scratching their heads. One or more enterprising thieves have made off with a bridge.
Yes, an entire bridge.
The walkway in question is the 58-foot pedestrian bridge that usually spans the Little Cuyahoga River in Akron’s Middlebury Run Park. Due to a wetland restoration project, the bridge had been temporarily removed.
The bridge was placed in a nearby field to wait for the completion of the restoration work. Nobody was keeping an eye on it, but then again, would you really expect someone to snatch a bridge?
The cops sure didn’t. But on November 11 they received a phone call informing them that the bridge was no longer there.
Sure enough, when the police went to check on the bridge, it was long gone.
A Surprisingly Easy Job
Understandably, the cops are completely baffled that somebody would steal an entire bridge.
“I have not heard of anything that large — albeit it disassembled but actually stolen, I can’t think of anything comparable in my 22 years [on the job],” Police Lieutenant Michael Miller told News 5 Cleveland.
“We know it will be met with mystery and questions: who and how and why? All of those are unanswered. It ranks high on the list of mysteries, that’s for sure,” he added.
It’s kind of surprising that nobody noticed anything strange going on with the bridge. According to the police, the thieves didn’t exactly steal the structure in one fell swoop.
In the field are tracks of one or more trucks the thieves used to transport the bridge. Additionally, they came back several times to dismantle the bridge.
The police say the crooks cleared the bushes around the area on November 3. They then first took all the deck boards, and later came back for the rest of the structure.
However, Miller said that it was probably fairly easy for the thieves to break the bridge apart. He likened its construction to oversized Lego blocks fastened to each other with bolts.
“It may not have been as complicated as we first thought. Essentially the bridge is made of some sort of polymer,” he explained.
“If you have any equipment, sockets, and things of that nature, it wouldn’t have been very difficult at all to begin the process of disassembling that.”
What a Worthless Bridge
The cops at least have an idea of how the thieves pilfered the bridge. But the bigger question is why they did it.
To be fair, it’s not like the bridge is exactly cheap. The total value of the structure is somewhere around $40,000.
“It could be used for a variety of different things as simple as landscaping or they could use it for some other engineering project, some other large-scale project,” Miller mused.
However, Miller believes that it’s more likely that the thieves would try to sell the bridge components as scrap to a recycler. There’s just one problem with that plan — the parts are practically worthless as scrap.
The polymer material can’t be easily repurposed or recycled. As a result, the amount of money the thieves would get for it is miniscule at best.
“Someone might mistakenly think there is a particular scrapping value of that particular material. Maybe they are mistaken and now they’re stuck with, ‘well, what do we do with it?’” said Miller.
As such, Miller doesn’t think the thieves thought their crime out all that well.
“It went beyond impulsive,” he summarized.
Still, a crime is a crime and the cops want to catch the bridge burglars. They’re asking anyone who may have seen or heard something to report it to the police.
“Someone in the viewing area has access to some information that we need and this is the ‘whodunit’ where we really need the community’s help to point us in the right direction to find the people responsible for removing that bridge,” Miller said.
If you live in Akron and think you might have some valuable information, you can call Akron police at 330 375 2490.