For over two decades, the owner of Dreams Transportation in Calgary has battled catalytic converter thieves who target the company's buses. But last week, the owner says, the situation hit a breaking point, with a brazen theft that unfolded in broad daylight and left a driver shaken by how openly it happened.
The incident took place at around 10:20 a.m. on June 15th. One of the company's drivers was sitting in a busy parking lot in northeast Calgary, simply reading a book and minding her own business, when she heard a noise coming from underneath her bus, the kind of sound that would not normally raise alarm.
At first, she thought the noise might be someone nearby inflating a tire. But when she got out to have a look, she found something very different: a pair of thieves at work. One woman was positioned at the front of the bus acting as a decoy, appearing to be on her cell phone, while a man underneath the vehicle made the cuts needed to remove the converter.
According to the account, the man made two cuts to free the catalytic converter. As soon as the driver noticed the woman, she yelled out, and the woman screamed the word Police, which appeared to function as a code word between the two to signal that it was time to leave the scene quickly.
The pair then tossed the stolen catalytic converter into a waiting vehicle and sped away. The fact that the theft was carried out so openly, in the middle of the day and in a busy lot, was part of what made it so unsettling for the driver, who said she felt threatened that people would be that desperate to do something like that.
The June 15th theft was not an isolated hit. It marked the third catalytic converter stolen off a Dreams Transportation bus all in that same day, underlining how persistent and coordinated the targeting of the company's fleet has become, even within a single 24-hour span.
Over the long run, the scale of the losses is significant. Dreams Transportation says approximately 120 catalytic converters have been stolen from its buses over the years. The driver involved in the latest theft was so affected that she did not even want to appear on camera to tell the story, a measure of how the repeated thefts have worn on those who keep the buses running.