http://www.tulsaworld.com/NewsStory.asp?ID=060820_Ne_A22_Black59281

I think stealing vital infrastructure components should be a federal crime with massive fines and prison time.

Common problem when I worked with Scottish Power.

Was sent once to a switching station where all the copper earthing had been stollen form head hight down to the ground (all the towers were live at the time) We replaced it with 1 1/2" alliminum stapping. Only to get sent back a week later. They stole that too.

Called out to a sub station that had triped out to discover the undergound 11kv cable partly exposed. Someone had tried to dig it up then cut it live with an axe. We found the wooden axe handle but no head. Police phoned all the local hospitals but no one had been admitted with burns. It could only happen in Glasgow !!!!!!

We just had our first copper theft at Hobsonville substation.

Doors were forced open, security lights smashed, PIR sensors damaged.

They took all the earthing leads. Had a go at the 110 Volts DC batterybank but left that, they opened various cabinets for a peek inside.

Ok the theft is bad, but the sub is near a school. Kids could have entered.

I reckon harsh penalties have to apply here to the offenders.

They are already stealing heavy aluminium lids from distribution pillars.

Scrap dealers are now supposed to ask for photo id, if people bring in any scrap metal in large quantities.

It might get tossed but I think the cops could find some "terrorism" type charges for destroying the power grid.
The PoCo could make sure somebody would get killed when they remove some easy looking piece but that would probably just get them sued, even if they did put big "high voltage present when removed" signs all over.

All they would need would be one very high resistance "fault" to the grounding grid.
In normal operation it would just waste a few watts of power but once you open it up and present that primary voltage it would get exciting fast...
... but that would be wrong

Had a situation in the Denver area recently. The guy hit two transformers in a new development area which were not hot. He made it to number three and made the wrong assumption with regard to it being hot. He is no longer with us upright folks.

There was a story in the news here a while ago along similar lines, although I forget which area it was in (one of the big urban areas of the Midlands or North, I think).

Never mind jail time. The thief got the death penalty -- Self imposed & carried out on the spot, of course.

So many crimes could be severely curtailed simply by imposing jail time or fines or both on the persons who enable these crimes. Such as the buyer of scrap copper, the employer of "illegals" or the giver of bribes as well as the receiver of bribes.

A few years ago we had a guy who stole a few boxes of return bends and took them to the scrap dealer. The boxes still had our shipping address on them so the dealer called us up and told us about it. We bought the parts back and he testified in court against the guy who stole them. If only everyone was like that.

I posted this here last month; Wire Theft

We just got hit again. Stripped another control van of all the SO and W cables exposed to the outside, but they didn't manage to break into the van and strip the innards too thank goodness.

Simple solution? Start making scrappers require IDs when buying scrap copper from guys in pickup trucks.

I was talking with our local telco yesterday. She said they've had lots of problems. They seem to think it's people in the industry, based upon the location of the thefts.

OT, a little... But, we just had an article in our local paper about a guy who'd gotten caught steeling bronze flower vases from gravesites.

The thieving for recycling is getting pretty bad.

Eric

Our local papers both ran a story this week about how lots of sections of the freeways are going dark. There is a camera system set up at all the freeway overpasses and what they saw was sort of astounding. The thieves wore orange safety gear, hardhats, etc, drove trucks that look similar to city maintenance vehicles with an amber stobe on top, and did the dirty work in broad daylight. Still have not been caught or Identified by the detectives.

A few years ago, one of the sound companies in the region had one of their trucks stolen out of their lot.. fully loaded with gear and cable.

the thieves got caught when they tried to recycle the cable.. the recycling company got suspicious of all this nice clean connectorized SO and SJO cable, in nice furniture grade road cases with the company logo on them..

It's been going on for years. I remember in the late 1970s sitting on the train outside Harpenden for about an hour once (a main line a little way north of London) as the railway was having signaling troubles.

Apparently somebody had slipped up to the junction one night with cutters and made off with a large quantity of the signaling cables.

Jersey guys, copper termites, are targeting the small stuff now!
Copper wiring reported taken

SOUTH AMBOY: Some $2,000 worth of copper wiring was reported stolen from a Route 35 South construction site, police said.

The incident occurred early Friday morning.

Police said six spools of copper wire — two red, two black, two blue — were taken from a building on the site.

Staff report

There is a legal term referred to as "attractive nuisance". This has been the basis for suing property owners where kids have drowned in pools that didn't fences around them, etc. I wonder how long it will be before a POCO gets sued because all that copper in a substation could be construed as an "attractive nuisance" for a copper thief.

Heck, crazier things have happened... it's the 1st "anniversary" of Hurricane Katrina, and look at how all the looting and mayhem was "justified" because they we're "hungry" or some other excuse... like they could really eat those plazma TV's and DVD players (couldn't even use them, since there was no power). So if people are "hungry" or "oppressed" enough, copper theft can easily be justified -- even if the rest of us have to sit in the dark.

Joe

(submitted by KCstudent)

Pole end of stolen conductors:



Bus entrance end of stolen conductors:



Picture of the whole run:

The above pictures are an addendum to my post on this thread: https://www.electrical-contractor.net/ubb/Forum1/HTML/007355.html

I'm still shaking my head over the gall of the guy who cut our feeders out...


Thanks to Bill for posting the pix for me!

OOPs!

I posted pix in wrong Copper Theft thread. They've now also been posted in the other thread.

Bill

http://www.ktul.com/news/stories/0806/356827.html

Another ten minutes and the police would have had a double whammy.

Some of them are just bound to end this way...
about 15 years ago, we were renovating a theater and our EC had just replaced the service conductors in the back of the building (a run of about 50 feet), then called for inpection and had the POCO energize them (due to the problems with copper theft back then). Later on that same night, the POCO was called out for a "no lights" call in the building adjacent to the theater. When they arrived, they found part of our new service conductors laying on the ground, along with the carcass of a thief, sporting nasty third degree burns to both arms and legs.

The thefts slowed down for a little while after the story went to the newspaper. This brain trust had been known all too well by local law enforcement.

Mike (mamills)

[This message has been edited by mamills (edited 08-30-2006).]

[This message has been edited by mamills (edited 08-30-2006).]

Do you guys make any attempt to mark your spools of wire? I think I would have a metal stamp (to heat and burn into the spool) made up with some innocuous looking logo and some numbers that would be unique to your company so you could identify them if the cops found them in a junkyard or some other guy's truck.
It is sad that it comes to this but it may be the only way to slow down the theft.
Loose wire still has the "melt weight" value but I suspect most "scrap" dealers want to sell full spools to less than honorable trades. I have seen pallets of brand new spools of wire at our scrap yard. You know these are stolen.
This will only be stopped if the stolen copper loses some of it's street value.

We just shut down a huge WWII era manufacturing plant (Fansteel).

We heard an alarm going off one day. The PD took a look around and found nothing, but noticed stuff in dissarray, so they kept an eye on the place.

Turns out there was a gang of 8-10 thieves working the site, including 1 on the roof as a lookout. They would use the old material carts to haul stuff to the far end of the building (2-3 football fields), and then hand-jack it out to a van through a small hole in the 8' fence by the railroad track embankement.