Parking Meters in Navy Yard area

Walking down the street from the metro to my office building (my home away from home) I started thinking about Cool Hand Luke, a great movie if you haven't seen it, and recalled the opening scene where the main character is drunkenly cutting the heads off the parking meters. For this he was arrested and thus the rest of the movie was set in motion.

Well the parking meters along M Street have several beads of welding going down the stalk, preemptively preventing any Luke-like person from using one of those pipe cutters. At least it would make it difficult.