Hey, Hamei, you'd better be careful on those streets..
Weighing 25 kilograms, manhole covers can fetch the equivalent of about $5.25 Cdn from scrap dealers - about a day's wages for labourers. Unscrupulous metal recyclers usually ignore laws that forbid them to buy the covers, which are clearly stamped with the seals of Shanghai utility companies, the paper said.
Hoping to change that, deputies to a city government advisory body, the Shanghai People's Political Consultative Conference, have submitted a proposal urging "severe punishment" for thieves and increased supervision over scrap dealers, the paper said, without giving details.
Over the last six weeks alone, thieves made off with 1,826 manhole covers, causing economic losses worth the equivalent of about $70,000, city water bureau official Zhu Jiong was quoted saying.
A four-year-old boy and a woman in her 80s drowned after falling through open manholes leading to drainage channels or utility pipes, the paper said. It wasn't clear whether the two fell in together.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany