This is a TNB Public Service Announcement. Don’t steal buildings.
We at TNB were not aware this message needed to be provided. We were wrong. But, truth be told, we’re kind of impressed that we were wrong on this one.
There’s a history of it happening before. In 2015, in Oregon, an entire house was stolen. The building was a log cabin, and served as a part-time “Summer” home to the owner. Upon arriving for an extended stay he found the foundation broken and the entire house missing.
Authorities found the house a little more than a mile away. Shortly after the owner left in 2014, people claiming they should have had rightful ownership to the cabin went to work on the foundation. After freeing the cabin, they proceeded to slide it onto a truck and drove around, looking to see if anyone wanted to buy a log cabin, cheap. They found a buyer, laid the house down, and arranged to transfer the property rights.
Theft of motor homes and “tiny houses” has been around for years; when a house is on wheels, thieves are going to take advantage of its mobility. Few people consider a full-sized home as transportable.
Still, having a log cabin stolen is a little less traumatic than finding a 200 year old church missing. That’s what happened in 2008 just outside of a small city about 186 miles northeast of Moscow.
As the BBC reported, church officials had visited the two-story church in July, and were considering revitalizing the church and putting it back into use. A trip in November to assess exactly what would be needed for such an effort returned an unexpected answer: to start, they’d need a church.
During October, a thieves had begun deconstructing the church, brick by brick, and had sold both the bricks and remaining religious artifacts on the black market. All that remained was a foundation and the base of some of the walls.
Compared to those two thefts, taking a location the size of a small car and weighing only 1,600 pounds would seem like a cakewalk… unless that building were, say, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. That’s what happened to the Boknis Eck Observatory in late August.
On the 21st, the station, created to monitor temperatures, water acidity, pollution and other potential environmental changes, suddenly stopped transmitting data. When divers were sent to investigate they found… nothing. Only some shredded cabling which had once been connected to the Observatory.
As reported in Popular Mechanics, authorities have not indicated they have any idea who might have stolen the observatory from its position on the sea floor. It was more than 70 feet below the surface and weighed too much to be pulled away by ocean currents or animals. More, it was in restricted waters off the coast of Germany, which limits the access people had to conduct their water-based “salvage” operation.
Whoever did it, a simple rule apparently needs to be brought to light: don’t steal buildings.
Question of the night: If you could have a secondary home, where would it be?
