Way back when I was young and stupid, a friend and I used to hop the fences at a nearby manufacturing facility to steal aluminum from the scrap bins. We could easily get 200-300 pounds over the fence in a few minutes. We would then load them into his truck and go recycle them a few days later.
A friend of mine that practically live on a boat and travels all around the atlantic coast; mentioned that they keep running across old torn down/ unattached powerline cables, that are either washed up into embankments or severely tangled up in old pier and other solid debris from past hurricanes.
would that still be considered stealing if it were removed and recycled, or would it be looked at as protecting the marine and wildlife environment from obvious pollution and or contamination of marine life/water source?
note: this cable is not attched to any ground poles and/or has both cables ends exposed and detached as a result of natural causes. (floods, hurricanes, destroyed bridges, or piers ( no longer apart of land.)
This used to be a problem here in Minnesota, but a recent law change has really cut back on it.
The law requires companies that buy such metals to keep records of who they buy from: they have to see state-issued identification (and keep copies of it), get the sellers signature on receipts, have to record the license plate of the vehicle they arrived in, must pay the seller by check rather than cash, etc.
This has made it much harder for thieves to sell this, so it’s become much less common. Now it mostly happens to empty, abandoned houses, where they get in and pull out the copper wiring & plumbing.
But going after the other end, the market for selling such stolen materials, has been much more successful than previous efforts to catch thieves in the act.
IANALawyer, but I would expect it depends on:
[ul]
[li]Whether the material is truly ‘abandoned’ or not (decommissioned cables that are awaiting collection for recycling - even if they’ve been waiting there for years, are probably still the property of the power company, whereas if they’ve been dumped or lost into water, are probably abandoned - local salvage laws may apply though)[/li][li]Maybe also whose property it is found on - even if it’s abandoned, I would expect the landowner to have a say in the salvage rights.[/li][/ul]
Local utility around here uses solid ground wire with their name etched every couple feet to prevent it’s sale as scrap.
Also: zombies
Zombies noted - many scrappers are now melting their copper down into ingots, thanks to Grant Thompson. How To Make The Mini Metal Foundry - YouTube
That is, the legit scrappers are doing it for convenience of storage - and I suspect the criminals are doing it to obfuscate the origin of the materials.
It’s not uncommon. Here’s a video showing a guy who got juiced while trying to steal copper wire. Not for the faint of heart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOHFyZh28W8
Can I sell you a bridge?
Thieves steal entire bridge in New Castle
And that’s not the only one to go missing.
I bet a radio station tower has some copper.
it is not allowed to operate its FM transmitter while the AM station is off the air.
Why not ?
There’s some copper in the wiring (coax, hardline, lightning protection) but not all that much. It’s also notoriusly stiff and unwieldy when people try to reuse or recover when out in the open with permission.
I don’t know but WAG it is a condition of their broadcast license. For example, their AM station might be a regional emergency alert node and only gets the FM license (which makes revenue) if they maintain the EAS stuff.
That’s the impressive part. They stole a 200ft tower/wiring and AM transmitter and nobody noticed until the landscaping company showed up.
Wait until the thieves discover EV charging stations.
A previous attempt to steal a tower. Not quite 200 feet long, but the transportation technology was surprisingly low-tech.
Comment from this Steve Lehto video.
Something isn’t right here… I’m in the broadcast industry (TV) and I can tell you that you tower maintenance, erection and disassembly is a highly specialized and dangerous job. The average thief cannot just climb a tower with a wrench and start hurling pieces to the ground. Besides, you’d have to have a flat-bed semi to haul all the structure away taking several trips. Also, it would take many days to disassemble.
The FCC requires constant remote monitoring and control of any transmitter - that’s part of the requirements to obtain and maintain an FCC license. The station would know within seconds when the transmitter was turned off. Even if it was a fully automated, low-power station - you must have a way to monitor and control the transmitter by someone at all times. No…something isn’t right here!
^^ It was stated in the other thread that the tower was already off-line for maintenance.
The station’s FM license was for a “translator” - an FM frequency to rebroadcast the station’s AM signal to the local area. The license for an FM translator expressly forbids it to do anything but re-broadcast the AM station’s programming. If the AM station was down for maintenance, the FM station should have been turned off, as well.
I’ve been reading some of the broadcasting boards’ discussion of this, and there’s a lot about this story that smells. As @dougrb notes, taking down a tower isn’t something two kids with chainsaws can do on a lark. The site was hundreds of feet away from anything, but the thieves would have had to haul stuff away on public roads. It probably took place over several nights.
And even if the station only had remote monitoring equipment, that equipment should have signaled that something was wrong on the AM side. Whoever was supposed to be monitoring the equipment was grossly negligent in failing to notice, and the station violated the rules by continuing to broadcast on FM while the parent AM station was down.