Some of us may have never heard of Hayastan Shakarian. Hayastan Shakarian was a 75-year-old woman arrested for single-handedly cutting off the internet in Georgia and Armenia on 11 Apr 2011. Ms. Shakarian, who lives in the poverty-stricken Georgian village of Armazi, around 10 miles from the capital Tbilisi, said that she had only been collecting firewood, though it turned out that she was scavenging for scrap metal when she accidentally cut off the fiber optic internet cable to Armenia and Georgia.
Georgia provides 90% of Armenia's internet, and the woman's unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours as the country's primary internet providers - ArmenTel, FiberNet Communication, and GNC-Alfa – were prevented from supplying their regular service. Television pictures showed reporters at a news agency in the capital Yerevan staring glumly at blank screens. Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected. The damage was detected by a system monitoring the fiber-optic link from western Europe, and a security team was immediately dispatched to the spot where the woman was arrested. She tearfully insisted she was innocent and had never heard of the web when she was arrested. "I have no idea what the internet is," she added. She was charged with damaging property and three years in prison if convicted. The interior ministry said she had no accomplices.
The Georgian railway network owns the cable. It is heavily protected, but landslides or heavy rain may have exposed it to scavengers. Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making money in the former Soviet Union. Some entrepreneurs have even used tractors to wrench out hundreds of meters of cable from the former nuclear testing ground at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. .
Stolen rail plates and screws caused a train derailment in Thailand. Nevertheless, copper and iron scavengers are a big business and some scavengers are turning to criminal activities to meet their quota in many places around the world. Similarly, it has been a nuisance across African countries such as South Africa, Nigeria, and DRC. Scavengers are known to remove functional railway slippers, rail sheets of steel, and rail iron rods, bolts, and bridge rails. Hard to believe but true.
South Africa: Metal thieves 'steal 10km of railway.'
How should we address the crimes of scavengers?
0%Scavengers should require registration and license
0%Ban scavenging all together
0%Leave it alone