Over the past three years the volunteers at Docklands Canal Boat Trust, who all have disabilities, have worked all hours to modernise our community boat.
Over the past few weeks we have shed blood to put in a place an energy management project which is funded by the Big Lottery Fund. By last weekend we had finished phase one of the project and were preparing to move on to phase two.
Sometime on 5th November some scumbags broke into the boat and destroyed all the work we have undertaken. As well as cutting out all the new cable and copper pipe they caused untold damage by ripping out sinks, wash hand basins and the boiler. Not content they then set about trashing the place. The photos below detail some of the damage caused:
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| Cables cut from the distribution board and ceiling |
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| New Cable and batteries ripped out |
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| They ripped the boiler off the wall just to get the copper out |
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| Everything thrown everywhere |
The sad thing about this fiasco is that the £000s of damage they caused will only get them about £30 at the scrap yard. In the mean time we have had to cancel our volunteer programme for the winter where we support young people with disabilities.
The scumbags who did this to us will not win as we won't let them. The police have prints and DNA and one day they will be brought to justice. In the meantime our board of Trustees will move forward in the spirit that makes our project unique.
Our boat was named Challenge because it was a major challenge to raise the funds and get the boat built in the first place. This is just another challenge in our long history and we will WIN...
