That old junk car might have new value
Posted on Monday, April 21, 2008
GARFIELD — Soaring scrapmetal prices are restoring the luster to broken-down cars and other junk — and putting a gleam in the eye of a new breed of backwoods thief.
It’s not just copper that crooks are stealing. Rusting car bodies and entire junk heaps are vanishing from back lots, thanks to voracious demand for raw commodities in China and India driving up prices, especially for scrap steel.
“If it’s metal, you’d better tie it down,” advised Norma Hern, who said thieves last month stole half a ton of scrap metal that she and her husband had stored behind their mobile home in Garfield. The stash included lawnmower bodies, an old metal tub and four broken kitchen stoves.
It wasn’t the first sign of unwelcome interest in such unlikely treasure, Hern said.
After a January tornado ripped through the neighborhood, opportunists started loading up twisted metal the winds had scattered. “I literally had people down here in my ditch, before we could start fixing it [the mess ] up,” Hern said.
Benton County sheriff’s Deputy Doug Gay said metal thefts are down in the county, perhaps because a fall-off in home building has left fewer easy marks for thieves pilfering copper wires. But lawmen in some of the more rural Northwest Arkansas counties said scrap-metal thefts have become a weekly, if not daily, occurrence.
“I had a woman call yesterday and say somebody stole her junk out of her field,” said Boone County Sheriff Danny Hickman. “It’s kind of funny in a way.
“ It’s just hard to investigate a missing pile of junk.” Hickman said he sees 10 or 12 trucks a day carrying loads of metal rolling down U. S. 65 toward a local scrap yard.
To be sure, rising prices have brought out legitimate entrepreneurs as well as thieves. Ads offering “free pickup” of junk cars, appliances and other metal junk have blossomed lately in rural newspapers and on the Internet and some offer to pay for junked cars.
Yardquest. com, based in Connecticut, offers “free junk car removal,” through a network of tow truck operators in all 50 states, to those who call a toll-free number. A company operator could not say Friday how business has been in Arkansas.
But the economic forces behind all the interest are not difficult to discern, said Bruce Savage, spokesman for the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries, a Washington D. C.-based trade association for salvage yards and other recycling businesses.
Once the metal ends up at local scrap yards, brokers then match the goods in U. S. yards with overseas customers, he said.
Scrap steel has doubled in price over the past year, driven largely by demand in burgeoning Asian economies, Savage said. Most of the price gain in steel has come this spring.
“It was $ 351 a ton in March,” Savage said. “It is $ 502 in April. If your mama’s got a Camaro in the backyard, go and get it.” Worried that salvage yard operators will be viewed as a conduit for thieves, Savage said his trade group is encouraging yard owners to photograph the junk that people bring in, note any distinguishing marks, check the ID of the sellers — and even write down license plate numbers.
“Some of this stuff is now becoming so blatant that we are trying to keep our industry on the positive side of this issue,” he explained.
The group, which has begun tracking sales and theft reports in hopes of making matches, has recorded thefts of aluminum bleachers from high-school football stadiums, catalytic converters from cars — even manhole covers, Savage said.
In Crawford County, several tire centers have reported aluminum wheels stolen, said sheriff’s office Capt. Jimmy Damante. He said they weren’t flashy wheels stolen for their looks.
“It was for the metal value,” he said.
In eastern Arkansas, officials from seven Delta counties plagued by metal thieves — who have gone so far as to pull the radiators off farm trucks at night — are now discussing tightening local regulations on scrap yards.
At Rogers Iron and Metal Corp., the policy is sellers have to show an ID for any sale of copper or for any sale of another metal that is valued over $ 25, said manager Thomas Hartmeier. If the item is a junk car, there is no requirement to show a title if it’s obviously junk, he said.
With junk cars going for $ 200 or so, depending on weight, they’re disappearing with regularity in some counties, police said.
And it’s not always as simple as good riddance for those whose junk goes missing.
“You’d think that’d be doing them a favor,” said a Northwest Arkansas investigator who asked that his name not be used. “But once they find out what it’s worth in the scrap market...”
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