Sewer Caps and Kepler Maps

San Francisco’s “Great Drain Robber” (ABC7 News Bay Area article.)

Small (~5”) sewer covers are disappearing in the middle of the night across the city.

One person was caught on Ring cameras in Bernal Heights, but no one knows why they covers are being taken.

Seemed like a good dataset for a map.

I pulled a decade of 311 reports filtered by a ‘missing drain’ tag (link to data source) and dropped that into Kepler.gl - the open source mapping viz tool from Uber. There’s a lot. (>13,000 cases since 2016!)

Caveats: 311 reports show when a sewer cover is reported missing, not when it disappeared. Also “missing” doesn’t equal “stolen,” but these are typically screwed on.

Some quiet side streets have been hit in clusters over and over again.

Kepler interactive map* & dataset embedded below.

Notice any patterns?

*Kepler isn’t great on mobile.