I am involved with railways in Great Britain and there seems to be at least one cable theft a week at the moment, mainly “oop north”. This despite Network Rail (the infrastructure operator) taking great pains to protect materials on site.
Very common in Vegas , although Johnny Law seems unable to do much to stop it.
Just recently our electric company put a GPS device into a spool of copper. The police followed it right to the warehouse where they found all the other stolen spools.
As an aside, it’s not that recent. My grandfather has always been in the electrical business in one sense or another, generally he buys and sells transformers. About twenty years ago I remember him having a problem with the coils getting ripped out of his transformers and sold for scrap. He set up some sort of a system (he enjoyed tinkering) that would call his home phone when a motion detector was tripped. He wound up catching the bad guy hiding inside the transformer.
Not a new thing. In Tree Grows in Brooklyn Frannie and Neely go to the junkie (junkman) every day to sell scrap stuff. The reason why the term’s meaning changed is b/c the drug addicts would be the junkie’s best customers b/c they were so desperate to find scrap to sell to the junkie.
In the “Police Blotter” section of last week’s local paper (covering Oak Park, pop. about 55,000), there were maybe 10-12 incidents of copper downspouts and rain gutters being stolen, often from churches. I’ve seen a few reports like this before, but never that many in one week.
They have also started to steal the lead off church roofs. Until the price of lead collapsed a few years ago churches were always favourite targets. It looks as though the “old crafts” are being revived now lead is valuable again.
Not long ago, there was an article in the paper about people climbing up to and breaking into running windmills on the Altamont Pass to steal the generator windings and associated wiring.
Plumbing is another popular source - thieves will steal copper pipe before it’s installed and are not above entering buildings under construction and cutting out the pipe that was installed earlier that day.
Most of it was steel with a bunch of aluminium, brass and carbide. About $1200 all told.
Reading the rest of this thread reminds me of news articles I’ve seen here and there of abandond houses being stripped of the copper piping.
It’s enough of a problem here for there to be a series of TV PSAs comparing copper thieves to reptilian monsters.
This thread reminds me of an engine dispatch to a brush fire along the Amtrak corridor in our district. Upon arrival we found two subjects who had climbed the tower structures and attempted to steal catenary wire above the trackage. Service faulted to ground via the subject’s persons and blew them off the structure. A minor fire was extinguished and the two decedents were turned over to the Office of the Medical Examiner.
Any particular reason for the raised price on metal, recently? War?
The reason I’ve seen most often cited are the booming economies in India and China. The Three Gorges Dam in China sucked up literally tons of stainless steel. Combine that with their rapid industrialization and it’s pretty obvious why metal prices are skyrocketing.
Last I heard, nickel was up to $11/lb and copper was something like $7/lb.
Oog, good point. 3 billion people or so could definitely suck up some serious metal if they weren’t creating new mining jobs (with modern methods) to match…
Oddly enough this came up at the family Thanksgiving get-together tonight. Myself, my two brothers and my brother-in-law were talking about B-i-L’s new horse trailer and how it was steel versus aluminum because of the cost. B-i-L mentioned copper being through the roof and my older brother, an IT/network manager for a power/telephone co-op in a developing section of Dallas, said they had been laying fiber optic cable to a new area recently and had several of the big rolls of cable stolen by people who presumably thought they were copper. My younger brother, a heating and air conditioning contractor, said he’s had several sites vandalized where thieves will steal the condenser from an industrial building and strip the coils out of it and leave the rest for scrap. My B-i-L, who inherited the family business as an electrical contractor, said he’s got a lot of copper odds and ends around the shop and he’s worried he may be burgalarized for them.
It was a surreal converstion for me, but then I’m the tightwad who unwinds the copper from fans and other small appliances which burn out and sells it for scrap instead of throwing it out with the fan so I should know the value of that stuff more than most. Still weird to see other people doing it, or going so far as to steal it.
I’ve also heard of mass theft of aluminum from various places. A local school lost a lot of aluminum bleachers one night from their football field. Figure a ten or twelve foot section of aluminum bleacher weighs fifty pounds or so, each one would be worth 25 bucks. Each was secured by eight or ten bolts, so one evening with a couple friends, a u-haul and a couple socket wrenches can net you some serious cash. I think they spot-welded the new ones on when they replaced them.
Enjoy,
Steven
Some experts predict we’ll be out of metal by the end of this century.
I started a thread about this, back in October, but I’ll be damned if I can find it.
The run-up in the price of copper is real-last month, my dad cleaned out his garage-he had tons of old plumbing stuff-old valaves (Brass) copper pile, joints, etc. Hw took them to the dump, and some guy took them out of his hands?
My question: copper was mined in CT and Vermont (as recently as the 1940’s)-if the price of copper keeps going up, will these older mines be economical to repoen?
If there’s any ore left to be worked and if there’s not EPA regs prohibiting it, then they probably will be.
The movie Jesus’ Son depicts Denis Leary ripping the wiring out of an abandoned house to sell as scrap- is this the same thing, or something different?
My Dad’s a Railroad Detective. Copper Wire Theft is his second most common thing to be called out for. (The first, as I recall, is trespassing.)
It’s true that copper and other random things often get taken by meth users or those who run labs. When I worked at a liquor store here in Ohio, we had to change the way the industrial cooler’s ventilation system ran so that the pipes were on the roof instead of out back, after we noticed that the pipes had been stolen several times in a few months…
Brendon