City replaces 17 stolen manhole covers stolen for scrap

Baltimore MD - The hole is about 20 feet deep and kind of smelly and full of water.

It’s a long way to fall.

When thieves wrestled the 90 pound cover off this storm sewer they didn't think that children or anyone else could be walking to the legendary Lou Karpouzie Fields to play a game.

But the folks who work here did...the immediately roped off the hole and called the city.

“They play on Tuesday night and the park along here and that's when he noticed it brought it to my attention right away because people walk through here thank God nothing happened because people could have fallen in there." Geraldine Bailey the field’s groundskeeper told ABC 2 News.

The city was Johnny on the spot but this now the 17th missing manhole needed a special size cover so they had to wait to find one.

To replace the covers on East Lombard Street it will cost the city roughly 18 hundred dollars.

But the cost to the public could have been even greater.

"What they're doing is unconscionable because they're putting people at risk they're really putting people’s lives at risk." City Public Works Spokesman Kurt Kocher says. "The amount of metal the cost of picking them up even the cost of replacement is small to the danger that's being created for our citizens."

Most of the stolen covers were in grassy areas on the side of East Lombard Street.

But the thieves even took some out of the middle of the road.

With a missing manhole you always think of the damage to cars. But for a cyclist this is bad.

Hitting a 25 inch gap with a bike would almost guarantee a trip to the pavement at the minimum.

"You don't realize just how hazardous it is if a manhole cover is missing until you ride a bicycle not that it's not hazardous in a car you're riding a bicycle it could quite literally result in a fatal accident not something to be taken lightly." Cyclist Richard Karel of Baltimore says.

After wrestling these now 17 manhole covers out of the ground loading them into a truck and carting them off, how much are they worth?

To a legitimate scrap metal dealer the most this 17 hundred pounds could fetch would be anywhere from 100 -150 bucks.

A lot of work for little profit city officials say.

To replace the missing covers the city had to dish out about 1800 bucks.