What brass neck!
MACHINE THIEVES DIG OUT ROAD ON TO A38
RAIDERS who made off with a £20,000 digger (left) dug out a road on to the A38 at Stretton to steal it.
Owner Tony Smith hit out at their “brass neck”.
BURGLARS fled with a mini-digger after hollowing out a makeshift road to steal the £20,000 machine from a Burton business.
They also took a £3,000 trailer and hundreds of pounds worth of lorry batteries while causing £6,000 worth of damage, the business owner said.
They escaped with their haul directly on to the A38 southbound carriageway in Stretton, immediately before the Clay Mills turn-off towards Burton, in the early hours of November 1.
Tony Smith, who owns Fen Grab Hire with his son Ben, said: “It made me fell sick.
“What do they stop at? The brass necks of them to dig a roadway out on to the A38. It beggars belief.”
He said it was unclear exactly when the thieves broke in, but he could identify roughly when the batteries were stolen because the lorries’ clocks had stopped at around midnight.
They had bought the two-and-a-halftonne orange Hitachi mini-digger at the start of last year, Mr Smith said, but had barely used it since then. “We had struggled to get it started, to be honest, so God knows how they did it,” he said.
He said the thieves had got in and started up one of the business’s larger excavators, which they used to smash down the metal perimeter fence around half a mile from the farmhouse where he lives.
They then dug through grass and foliage between the fence and the A38 to form a makeshift escape route.
They stole the mini-digger from the barn it was kept in, he said, somehow moving a forklift out of the way in the process.
It was then driven on to one of his trailers and towed away using one of the thieves’ own vehicles, which they had driven through the destroyed fence.
Mr Smith added that there would doubtlessly be additional costs because of improvements to security and hiked insurance premiums after the raid.
He said: “It makes you wonder the extent I have to go to security-wise to protect the business.”
Mr Smith’s daughter, Emma, said of her dad and brother: “They work hard, six or seven days a week most of the time, and then there’s people that come and do this.
“It was right next to the A38 – someone must have seen or heard something.”
Staffordshire Police said the burglars also caused a “considerable” amount of damage to the barn. Anyone with information that could help the police should call 101, quoting incident number 123 of November 1.