On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 2:43 PM, Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net> wrote:
On Saturday 11 April 2009 08:31:55 Joe Greco wrote:
Speaking of that, a manhole cover is typically protecting some hole, accessway, or vault that's made out of concrete.
An oxyacetylene torch or a plasma cutter will slice through regular steel manhole covers in minutes.
Yes, but we were discussing locked covers, which (given the underlying assumptions of this discussion) might be a bit heavier. Further, it would be vaguely suspicious and more noticeable for a "road crew" or "power company" truck to be deploying such gear, might draw more attention.
Cop: 'What are you fellows doing there with the torch?" Me: "Us? Oh yea.... some dipstick plugged up our lock here with epoxy, our quick solution cause of the outage is to cut the lock/blah off with a torch, bummer, eh? I hate dipsticks..." Cop: "Cool, have a good night!" :(
The locking covers I have seen here put the lock(s) on the inside cover cam jackscrew (holes through the jackscrew close to the inside cover seal rod nut), rather than on the outside cover, thus keeping the padlocks out of the weather.
More expense. :-)
and complexity and parts to lose and people to have away during normal outage repairs and ... :( fail.
Requires a certain atmosphere of distrust, unfortunately. And slows repairs way down, especially if the 833's key is lost....
Certainly it is *possible* to do it, but given the other variables, does it make *sense*?
Consider what I was saying about just going to town with a backhoe. You have a lot to protect.
and I also would ask.. what's the cost/risk here? 'We' lost at best ~1day for some folks in the outage, nothing global and nothing earth-shattering... This has happened (this sort of thing) 1 time in how many years? Expending $$ and time and people to go 'put padlocks on manhole covers' seems like spending in the wrong place... (yes, I agree also that simply dropping into a manhole with an axe/hacksaw is pretty simple to do, it's also just about impossible to realisitcally protect against) -Chris